The artist inherited his intellectual (as opposed to sensational) approach to the poster from his mentor, Henryk Tomaszewski, constructing his works as ‘graphic and conceptual charades.’ Wasilewski also composed colour posters, which, similarly to his other pieces, were based on a limited range of colours, although the author is not afraid to introduce bright hue.
In 1975, the artist created an anti-war poster, in which he manipulated the Shakespearean ‘To be or not to be’ by inserting the word ‘war’ as the shadow of ‘or.’
In 1994, Wasilewski received the first prize at the competition for the design of a poster commemorating the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. The winning poster shows a torn Polish flag with the Kotwica – the World War II emblem of the Polish Underground State and the Home Army – painted on it set against a black background.
Wasilewski creates a lot of drawings, treating them as a personal preparation for his later prints – posters, covers, and illustrations. He demonstrates an affinity to the drawings of Matisse and the oriental art of calligraphy. During his stay in Beijing, he observed the drawings of Buddhist monks.
What I have always been fascinated with in those drawings is: the transformation of an object into something which is a nearly deobjectified pictogram; the scope of control and the lack of it – an uninhibited gesture, a surprise, and at the same time a thematic rigor. All of this is the area of my explorations
