Landscape from Orłów

Pejzaż z Orłowa [Landscape from Orłowo] by Wacław Wąsowicz does not show a typical coastal landscape. It is rather its contradiction. It exposes a cramped space fenced off with wooden huts and makeshift sheds, filled with simple objects and lazily resting figures – one huddled together, sitting at the entrance, the other, in the distance, spread out directly on the ground.

The character of the landscape of the fishing villages that Wąsowicz visited in 1926 is evidenced by scarce traces, freely hanging nets and other everyday tools and props. The painter treated the rural picture sketchily, limiting the representation to a narrow, ‘photographic’ frame, hastily and synthetically drawing objects and figures, giving the scene a very simple, austere form. This lesson of geometric, synthetic approach in Wąsowicz's work was the result of his encounter with modern painting in the Formist grouping, and later with Rhythm. The artist was one of the founding members of the first modern groups in independent Poland. In the mid-1920s he travelled to France, finding and assimilating changes in modern painting. Stylistically, he drew on the simplicity of Paul Cézanne's modelling and the expressionist manner of hastily applied colour separated by a strong dark contour according to Maurice de Vlaminck.

These different schools of painting have gained a primitive expression in the portrayal of a specific place – a courtyard filled with random objects, which becomes the scene of lazy relaxation in the full, hot sun of an August afternoon. The simple meaning of the representation has been treated with a crude painterly style.

Marcin Lachowski