The Track III

The canvas presents a terrifyingly hostile landscape crushed by bulldozers developed near a block of flats, which grows in depth on the horizon. In the foreground, in the basin of the terrain, two railway tracks run. On the track located to the right side, a lonely man, shown near the right edge of the composition, has come to a stop. The tracks, coming out from the bottom and left sides of the picture, break off abruptly before the prisms of earth, manifesting their uselessness and the fact that they lead to nowhere. The man, dressed in bell-bottom jeans and a knee length overcoat, is holding his hands in its pockets and looking down on the rails, walking on the decaying wooden sleepers overgrowing with vegetation. His shadow falls to the left and reaches the track on the left side, under which there are no longer any sleepers. One can not see the character's face and the reversing of his side and back to the viewer resembles paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, with the exception, of course, that the man in Łubowski’s picture is not witnessing an epiphany, but is confronting the overwhelming, hopeless, and melancholy surroundings where there is no escape. This impression is enhanced by elements such as the greyness of the solid blocks, the barrier of heaped earth, the severed tracks, and the subdued, ashy palette of colours. This is probably the artist’s self-portrait, painted on the basis of staged photography, in which the author comments on Polish reality in the second half of the 1970s. [M. Smolińska]