Make an offer
Wincenty Czwartos – Exercises Against a Mountain Landscape, 2023
Exercises Against a Mountain Landscape by Wincenty Czwartos is an intimate oil painting from 2023, in which landscape is transformed into a tactical space. The work belongs to the artist’s characteristic strategy of confronting painterly tradition with the contemporary experience of threat. Instead of an explicit battle scene, the viewer encounters an image of tension: a calm landscape is interrupted by abstract signs that suggest exercises, manoeuvres or preparation for conflict.
The background of the composition is an expansive mountain landscape, painted freely and with a strong sense of colour and organic rhythm. Rolling bands of green hills, a blue ribbon of water in the valley and a pinkish-red sky create a space that initially appears calm, almost idyllic. Yet the landscape is not a neutral view. In Czwartos’s work, nature becomes a stage upon which mechanisms of control, observation and military order begin to reveal themselves.
Across the sky and slopes, the artist places black vertical rectangles. Their rhythmic arrangement, regular intervals and repeated proportions give them the character of signs marked on a map, orientation points or simplified symbols of deployment. They are foreign to the soft matter of the landscape: geometric, dark and precise. They introduce the coldness of a diagram and the suggestion of planned, controlled and potentially military action.
This contrast between organic landscape and abstract sign forms the central tension of the painting. The painterly softness of the hills is juxtaposed with the severity of the black modules, which may be read as targets, markers, positions, silhouettes or elements of a training simulation. Czwartos does not depict war itself, but the moment that precedes it — the stage of preparation, in which space has already been subjected to the logic of conflict.
At the bottom of the composition, just above the lower edge of the canvas, appears a horizontal pale pink rectangle. Its stable form contrasts with the rhythm of the black signs. It may suggest a starting line, boundary, manoeuvre zone or conventional point of reference. It introduces an organising element into the composition, structuring the field of vision and reinforcing the association with a tactical map.
The title’s reference to “exercises” gives the painting a particularly unsettling meaning. What we see is not yet an open battlefield, but neither is it an innocent landscape. It is a transitional space: a place where nature begins to function as a training ground. Czwartos shows the moment when landscape loses its autonomy and becomes absorbed into the order of planning, simulation and potential violence.
Exercises Against a Mountain Landscape is a work of strong formal discipline and subtle critical force. Wincenty Czwartos combines landscape, geometric abstraction and wartime iconography within an intimate format, creating an image suspended between painterly tradition and the cold logic of contemporary conflict. From a collector’s perspective, the work stands out through its economy of means, distinctive composition and characteristic tension between the beauty of nature and the premonition of threat.
Wincenty Czwartos
Exercises Against a Mountain Landscape, 2023
Technique: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 40 × 48 cm
Category: painting
Art movement: figurative art / abstraction
