Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Janusz Janowski, PhD

Latin Figurations, the exhibition of works by Tadeusz Boruta, Antoni
Cygan and Piotr Naliwajko, is part of the exhibition series Languages
of Art: Familiar Ideas. Its principle is the comparison of the oeuvres
of three artists who use the same expressive convention in a way that
allows for situating their works within one stylistic trend, a juxtaposition
that reveals significant albeit subtle differences in the use of individual
formal and expressive elements.

All three subjects of the exhibition shaped their painting language on the basis of means of expression developed in the tradition of representational — figurative — painting, whose chief characteristic is the analogous attitude towards the forms of the reality of the world, with the central expressive function of the human figure. The external world, with all its wealth of spatial forms, shapes, colours and the play of light and shadows, is a fundamental
reference point for this painting convention, both in the aesthetic as well
as ideological and narrative aspects. However, each of the painters adapted the
technical aspects to their own artistic intentions in a different way, including the
shaping of the painting surface by articulating the work of the brush, the chromatic value formation of individual compositional elements, the use of specific colour schemes and compositional structures, iconographic definition of the subjects taken up, and the use of emulation as an expressive strategy. In the context of the aforementioned elements, the paintings of Tadeusz Boruta are characterised by a particular originality of compositional solutions — primarily the use of subjects grounded in the Latin tradition — and their narrative clarity, as well as the reduction of pictorial values, the simplification of the modelling and the use of cool colour schemes. Antoni Cygan, drawing on important biblical, mythological and genre themes, is the only one of the artists to readily use the strategy of emulation in the scope of compositional structures and the chromatic value characteristics. Moreover, he attaches great value to the richness of painterly material and a nuanced play of colour and tone. On the other hand, Piotr Naliwajko uses the motifs of the traditional Christian iconosphere with casual finesse and suggestiveness to build content accentuating the contemporary context of moral issues, often in a controversial manner. At the same time, he combines panache and ease of shaping figurative, often complex narrative constructions with great technical and formal freedom, emphasised by the sweeping brushwork, lightness of painting, richness of colours and wide-ranging combinations of usually warm hues. As a result, the works by the three artists presented in the exhibition, generally classified as figurative, reveal to the viewers separate and peculiar worlds of technical and visual qualities, narrative shaping, as well as an understanding of the universalism of the language of art.