Beginning in the 1990s, Olbiński began to paint, and today it is painting that constitutes the essential part of his practice. It is a direct continuation of the artist’s poster and illustration style. Olbiński’s first paintings were literally illustrative – created in 1992 as illustrations to poems by a poet and gallerist friend, partly based on repainted, pre-existing illustrations. The boundaries between the two fields remain fluid. As the artist said in a conversation with Agata Czarnacka:
Even when someone commissions a poster from me today, I paint a painting – one that is a painting but could just as well be a poster.
Olbiński’s works can be found on the sweatshirts of the Polish streetwear brand MISBHV or on postage stamps in Israel and France. They also became the inspiration for Ian Lukins’ poems, published together with reproductions of the works in the book Ars Picturae, published in 2018. Olbiński himself has also made literary attempts. In 2007, he made his debut as a writer with the volume 12 Short Stories.
The visual vocabulary of Olbiński's paintings remains the same as in his design work, only the medium has changed, and the visual metaphors and games of associations are detached from the texts they are supposed to refer to. The scenes take place in a usually idealised, even bucolic landscape, amongst plains and hills overgrown with evenly trimmed, bright green grass, on the seashore or amongst rocky cliffs or under a bright sky dotted with picturesque clouds. At the same time, this landscape undergoes surreal distortions – the sea and the ground roll up like a carpet, birds sit underground on tree roots instead of on branches, people squat resting their feet on the moon or they blend into the elements of the landscape. These distortions are often dynamic – drapes hang dramatically in the wind, transformations freeze at the climax.
Although this use of poetics derives from the surrealist tradition, it lacks the element of the uncanny, essential for this tradition – Olbiński tries to enchant the viewer rather than cause existential anxiety. In his work, the deformation of reality goes in the opposite direction – whilst historical surrealism explored what was pushed out into the unconscious and what was disturbing, Olbiński looks for escapism, a world cleared of anxieties and uncomfortable things, a safe, oneiric asylum. It is also reflected in his way of depicting the female body, a constant motif in Olbiński's paintings. There is no predatory eroticism in them, no surrealistic 'compulsive beauty' and transformation into a defragmented fetish, as in the case of Hans Bellmer's dolls; instead, Olbiński strives for a neoclassical, statuesque ideal straight from the Renaissance representations of the goddess Venus. Whilst the historical surrealists read in psychoanalysis brought out the repressed aspects of sexuality in the bourgeois society, Olbiński, on the contrary, smooths out and aestheticises sexuality.