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Wincenty Czwartos – Air Battle, 2024
Air Battle by Wincenty Czwartos is an intimate oil painting from 2024 that, despite its modest format, carries a monumental expressive force. The artist condenses motifs present in his larger works, abandoning extended figurative narration in favour of pure symbolism, rhythm and the rigour of geometric composition. The result is a restrained, cool and highly suggestive image — a painterly record of contemporary conflict reduced to a sign.
The composition is almost entirely immersed in blue. The saturated tonality of the background, marked by the artist’s characteristic undulating rhythm, may be read as a direct evocation of the “signature of death” known from the painting of Andrzej Wróblewski. Blue does not function here as decoration. It becomes a space of absence, coldness and threat — a symbolic abyss in which the titular battle takes place.
At the centre of the painting, the artist places a lighter, grey-blue quadrilateral. This geometric form recalls a Suprematist “empty sign” in the spirit of Kazimir Malevich, yet within Czwartos’s work it acquires new meanings. It may function as a radar, screen, target, observation window or isolated field of confrontation. It is the compositional focal point — a cool, almost technological zone around which the movement of the black forms is organised.
The titular battle is fought by black, predatory modules that whirl around the central field in a violent yet controlled chaos. Their sharp silhouettes balance between abstract sign, bird-like form, raven, crow, projectile and modern fighter jet. Czwartos turns them into hybrids of nature and technology — figures of threat that resist clear naming, yet whose aggressive energy is immediately legible.
The painting’s key tension lies between decorative rhythm and military menace. The arrangement of the black modules possesses an almost ornamental order, yet this order proves deceptive. Beneath the aesthetic organisation of forms lies an image of siege, attack and technological violence. Air Battle presents conflict as a system of signs — without bodies, faces or explicit narrative, but with a powerful sense of danger.
The work may be read as a contemporary reinterpretation of battle painting. Instead of heroic figures and spectacular scenes of combat, we encounter a cold, almost abstract diagram of war. Czwartos suggests that contemporary conflict increasingly takes place at a distance: in the air, on screens, within systems of technological surveillance and remote strike capability. Painting becomes here a tool of critical observation, addressing a world in which violence is disembodied, yet loses none of its real force.
Air Battle is a work of strong concentration and clear collector appeal. It combines Wincenty Czwartos’s recognisable artistic language with references to Wróblewski and Malevich, as well as a contemporary reflection on war, technology and the symbolic dimension of violence. Its intimate format reinforces its emblematic character — a small yet intense painting that functions like a warning sign.
Wincenty Czwartos
Air Battle, 2024
Technique: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 48 × 40 cm
Category: painting
Art movement: figurative art
