Andrzej Żygadło portrays landscapes bearing scars – places where absence and lack become tangible. In his painting, focused on the land of the Lemkos and Boykos, what is as important as what is on canvas is what is not visible: lost landscapes, non-existent villages, ruined Orthodox churches.

Andrzej Żygadło’s exhibition Full Circle presents two painting series: Shrine and Orthodox Church Site. The paintings draw their inspiration from his native region – today, the Polish-Ukrainian borderland.

 

The recurrent themes in Żygadło’s work are landscape, architecture and figures whose images have been transferred from archival photographs. The painting compositions – based on motifs assembled from a variety of sources in a painstaking research process – coalesce into a coherent whole. For years, the artist has been collecting family histories, talking to residents of the borderlands and perusing the archives. He has created a unique method of talking about the past, depicting the difficult experiences of a population, whose culture and heritage have been systematically erased.

 

Andrzej Żygadło first came across a site of a destroyed church in his childhood, whilst staying in a sanatorium. The patients would take a recuperative walk along a path in Rymanów-Zdrój, which led through the area of what used to be the village of Wołtuszowa, and ran through the forest next to the site of the former Orthodox church, adjacent to the cemetery. This encounter with absence and loss, in counterpoint with the ethnographic treasures and beauty of nature of this region, became, over time, an impulse to develop a synthesising language of painting.

 

The works in the Shrine series are based on an idiosyncratic method of composition: the artist uses archival materials depicting sites of worship that no longer exist, but onto the canvas transfers only the landscape, into which he then incorporates – with meticulous precision – fragments of architecture.

 

The Orthodox Church Site series also revolves round the sites of destroyed places of worship, but is based on contemporary photographs. From this series, which the artist has just embarked on, we are only showing in the exhibition one work, Rożniatów 2013, Orthodox Church Site.

 

In this painting, it is the title alone that alludes to the temple no longer there. The canvas is filled with a landscape into which the artist has introduced a black square – a suggestive window or perhaps a door or gateway, evoking symbolic eschatological representations and transience. Geometric forms can be read as references to suprematism and an intended polemic with Kazimir Malevich, who postulated breaking with tradition. Similar pictorial logic is applied to the motifs of the sun and the moon, recurring in many paintings. Their symbolism is taken from the iconography of the Crucifixion and the Last Judgement.

 

The titles of the paintings name specific places and dates, reflecting the artist’s research process and indicating sources of inspiration. The eponymous references to Orthodox churches – highlighting, after all, the conspicuous absence of these shrines in the images – are intended to capture the process of the erasure of the history and the trauma. The destroyed temples leave a void filled by nature, meadows, paths and fields.

 

Alongside landscape, architecture is just as significant a motif in Żygadło’s work; its ideological axis – the Orthodox church, to which he refers as a ‘hram’, a word borrowed from Orthodox Slavic language. The architecture is reproduced with punctilious precision, although reproduced in selected highlights – there are chapels, gates, sacred figures; just like the people that appear in the paintings, they are taken from archival photographs.

 

Andrzej Żygadło has developed a painting language that is indeed almost meditative. The melancholic colour palette that he uses – delicate greys, greens and blues – embeds his works in an ambiguous environment, suspended between the past and a projection of the imagination. He draws on a variety of sources – oral history, photographs, nature – which he subjects to his own painterly rigour. The motif of the destruction of the temple has a dimension of existential reflection. It is this quest for the metaphysical that becomes the becomes the overarching, unifying theme of the exhibition Full Circle.