Landscape with trees

Krajobraz z drzewami [Landscape with Trees] is a late painting by the artist, who died in 1907. It also shows his sensitivity to colour and textural development and is part of the artist's oeuvre as an expressionist painter, developed in his own, original way.

The visuality of the landscape is created by compact, strongly distinguished irregular forms – dark dense patches of paint in the lower part of the picture and lighter, more-freely applied ones in the upper part – separated by a flexible line constituting the horizon. Massive silhouettes of various sizes, defined by dark, thickly applied paint, are incorporated into the image. The painting is thus an austere representation, referring to the elementary, primordial feeling of nature – a horizon separating the earth from the sky, dark, dense masses of trees and bushes, faded ochres of clay and intensely green grass. Using a variety of colours and textures, the painting shows the distance and weight of individual objects. The landscape, painted hastily, vigorously and expressively, highlights the way the world is constituted. Against the background of the artist's work can be seen the progressive simplification and disintegration of the object, reduced to the materiality of the painting, paint, and the extraction of mutual relations. At the same time, it shows the feeling of nature limited to the basic image and saturated with subjective presence. It reveals the image of the world that appears in the process of creation and recognition of individual forms as the mutual interchangeability of the painter's gesture, the observed object, and vision – interchangeability contained in the subjective presence of the artist in the landscape and the corporality of the viewer communing with the matter of the painting. It becomes a record of an expressive gesture that negates the realistic and objective reproduction of nature.

Marcin Lachowski