Landscape

Jan Stanislawski was a master of Young Poland landscape painting. In his travels he both recorded the landscape of his native Ukraine and created compositions devoted to the areas around Krakow and Zakopane. As a subject, landscape occupied a prominent place in the artist's work, showing stylistic changes and the painter's artistic technique. Landscape was treated realistically, symbolically, it expressed an impressionistic play of colours – it was a barometer of artistic sensitivity and a dialogue with pictorial conventions. In Stanisławski's work, it became a sovereign theme which accentuated the modern autonomy of art, but also conditioned the symbolic message and existential experience. Using a small, as it were handy format of paintings, he created simplified, hastily painted studies emphasising the presence and experience of the painter in relation to nature.

Pejzaż [Landscape] was created soon after 1900. At that time the artist lightened his painting palette and shaped the specific composition of the painting – a landscape divided by a horizontal horizon line with a great mass of dominating blue sky. The vast landscape is shaped by different ways of depicting shapes, differentiating the densely superimposed parts of the foreground, forming sunburnt grasses, then horizontal stripes of yellow, forming gently-stretched fields of cut corn, and finally, the flexible line of the blue horizon reveals a mountainous landscape in the far background. The whole is dominated by a blue sky, freely shaped by lightened parts of clouds. Stanisławski's study combines the analysis of light diffused in a vast landscape with the problem of bringing out the diverse elements of nature – changing textures, distances, and varied matter. The landscape, captured with a hasty glance, suggestively and quickly sketched with a patch of colour, creates cognition of the world as a mystery of changeability, movement, and light with a direct, physical feeling of the roughness and hardness of things. The landscapes acquire the character of a metaphysical encounter with the world, of changing views and visual essence. The dominant sky becomes a visible element of a symbolic performance, illuminated by an inner light and triggering a bodily experience of nature.

Marcin Lachowski