Red Wall

The canvas is a landscape with a centrally placed tree with tangled bare branches in the foreground, and the titular red wall – which seems to be a prison façade with crated windows – in the background. The arabesque of a grey-blue brushwood and a decoratively displayed grey grass is contrasted with the flat red blotch of the wall, varied only with two rectangular windows. The impenetrable darkness of the space behind the windows plays with the anthropomorphic impression that the windows are the eyes of a fragmentally framed figure. In a straight iconographic reading, this is simply a dramatic demonstration of an uninhabited, inhospitable and fortified space. However, the artist’s erudition and his frequent invoking of the Young Poland’s art allows us to see in the painting not only a dialogue with Maciejewski’s favourite painter – Wojciech Wojtkiewicz – but also a painting treaty about the impossibility of seeing when perpetually popping up screens (created both by nature and by culture) make the modernistic ideal of seeing is believing unattainable. Additionally, the artist’s well known collecting ardour reminds us of his enthusiasm for carpets and sophisticated ornaments of the East. [A. Markowska]