It is no coincidence that his 1958 solo exhibition held at the Salon in Warsaw, “A Study in Space” is associated with the first use of the concept of an ‘environment’, one of the most radical ideas to be introduced to the twentieth-century lexicon of art terms. It took into account his unique spirit of abstraction that proposed the primacy of interrelationships between the various works and the dynamics of the viewer when faced with an act of color emancipation. As for designating Fangor as the romantic among op artists, there is a redolent nostalgia in imagining the youthful curiosity of a fourteen-year-old and the telescope he constructed and the blurry objects he viewed through the lens of that makeshift device. Born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1922, he would have fashioned the tubular contraption in 1936 (or thereabouts) and he lived as he dreamed of pulsing stars and celestial bodies, the moon’s penumbra as it passes through its phases, the jewel-like twinkling of Venus in the night sky. That passion set in motion a lifelong pursuit to achieve the technique and ability as a painter to create a system of visual metaphors for the optics of such cosmic phenomenon reduced to pure light and color expressed as blurred circles, waves, amoebas, and cloud shapes.

SU 10 was painted in 1971 during what is generally considered Fangor’s golden years, between 1958 and 1975. It was the year after his solo exhibition at the Guggenheim when 37 canvases were installed along the walls of the spiraling ramps of that breathtaking paean to Frank Lloyd Wright’s genius. The union of that architectural anomaly and Fangor’s unique spirit of abstraction proved the ultimate showcase for his long-held interest in thinking about the spatial relationships of his works displayed in toto with conscientious intent as to how the experience might likely affect the observer. It is not difficult to imagine with its highly saturated hues and vibratory effects that SU 10, a work of intensity and strength could own its place when viewed looking upward from the ground floor rotunda to the rising tiers to panels pulsing with color as if nebulae suspended in orbit. 

The impact of SU 10 as a study in color suggests an artist fully invested in exploring the effects of pleasure as an aspect of seeing. Closely related to large-scale M 74 in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum, its undulating bands of oscillations of highly saturated colors project a sensual presence and are clearly chosen to provoke an emotional response. Today, we are inclined to compare such a work with artists of the Light and Space Movement — James Turrell comes to mind as an artist able to manipulate light, space, and nature with similar goals in mind. Yet Fangor is a painter, not an art technician utilizing effusions of light with due consideration for spatial relationships. It is Fangor’s remarkable ability to blur contours so that the eye cannot capture the moment of transition between shapes that sets him apart from other painters and provides the ‘visual penetration (that) gains the highest value…because it is a space of opening, movement, and life that cannot be contained in any abstract formula.’ (Stefan Szydlowski, Wojciech Fangor: Space as a Game, ex. cat., Kraków, 2012, pg. 133) The technique is called ‘sfumato’, and the Fangor’s ability has earned him praise as the twentieth century equal to Leonardo da Vinci who described and practiced the technique.