Pilgrim

The Latin word peregrinus, from which the Polish word "pielgrzym" (pilgrim) derives, means a foreigner—someone who does not belong to the local community, but has come from afar. Although the term is usually used in reference to a person making a journey to a place of worship, a participant in a pilgrimage, metaphorically it is understood as a description of someone who travels the world extensively. Yet not like an ordinary tourist, but rather someone focused on a single object or sacred entity toward which they journey.

How does this manifest in the work of Dawid Wojtalewicz? The exhibition Pilgrim attempts to answer this question.

The artist never rests on his journey, continually collecting new experiences in the places he visits. His art is a form of sharing with the viewer the feelings that accompany him on this trek. A trek not only literal, from place to place, from country to country, but also spiritual—through the labyrinth of painting and philosophical thought, in search of absolute beauty.

At this point, one might ask: what is beauty? Antiquity already grappled with defining this concept, and it remains the domain of research for philosophers, artists, and theorists across various fields related to aesthetics in the broad sense. Beauty is precisely the source of the Platonic triad of highest values—truth, goodness, and beauty—to which Wojtalewicz frequently alludes in his explorations. They lead him to an understanding of beauty in a metaphysical sense, extending far beyond superficial perception, which in turn brings him close to Romantic artists. They understood beauty as a glimpse of truth rather than the external harmony of individual elements in a work, not as a property of a material object, but as an experience mediated through a work of art.

The artist classifies his work as neo-Romantic, and one of his favorite creators is Caspar David Friedrich—one of the leading representatives of Romantic painting. The artist’s canvases frequently feature views of mountain ridges, as well as figures seen from behind, absorbed in the contemplation of the landscape. While in Friedrich’s work the human figure clearly separates itself from the surrounding nature, in Wojtalewicz’s art this boundary is almost entirely dissolved. The mysterious pilgrim in his paintings traverses mystical landscapes that are not necessarily geographically identifiable, yet are powerfully connected to the feeling of a specific place. His figure often seems to dissolve into flames and merge with the surroundings. We thus have the pilgrim—a motif appearing in specific paintings—and the path he traverses, which is a painterly record of the subjective feelings accompanying the artist on his real pilgrimages, expeditions aimed also at spiritual improvement and growth toward the Absolute.

One of the stops along Dawid Wojtalewicz’s pilgrim route was the Athos peninsula, where, under the guidance of Demosthenes Avramidis, he completed an apprenticeship in icon painting. Contact with the monks inhabiting the Holy Mountain enriched his collection of experiences with techniques of meditative prayer leading to hesychia1. Hesychasts proclaimed the possibility of beholding the Divine Light through intense prayer, contemplation, and specific ascetic practices involving breath retention during prayerful stillness.

Footnotes

1. Hesychia, hesychia (Greek: ἡσυχία) – stillness, silence. A concept of profound significance in the Eastern Orthodox mystical tradition, denoting a state of inner harmony and peace as a means of uniting with the divine. Of immense importance for the practice of hesychasm is the contemplation of the Tabor light, which the apostles witnessed during the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ on that mountain. Through this light, uncreated in its essence, as hesychasts taught, the ascetic enters into communion with God.

The greatest role in painting created under the influence of hesychasm was played by light. In the frescoes of one of the leading representatives of this movement—Theophanes the Greek—light almost annihilates matter. Looking at some of Dawid Wojtalewicz’s paintings, we perceive a tendency to depict radiance, to seek it in natural phenomena, but also in light brought about by human activity. Often, patches of color mixed with rays of light create the phenomenon of pareidolia2 on the canvas—we discern familiar shapes within them, not necessarily rigidly defined by the artist, who enjoys playing with the viewer in this way, leaving room for free interpretation and treating it as a complement to his own works. For this reason, he does not give titles to his pieces, unwilling to impose a specific train of thought regarding them. At the same time, he wants his works to act as a window to the spiritual world. Symbolically, the color that bridges the spiritual world with the corporeal in his art is pink—created by mixing red, associated with physicality, and white, which is the spiritual, transcendent color. The final flash of light after sunset before the arrival of dusk is also pink. It is a transition into another reality. Much like the painting of Dawid Wojtalewicz, which consists of creating mystical and spiritual pictorial spaces where beauty can be experienced in a new way.

Dorota Ożdżyńska

2. Pareidolia – the phenomenon of perceiving familiar shapes in random details, accompanied by a sense of the unreal nature of these perceptions (which distinguishes them from illusions), typically occurring with full awareness. Pareidolia can involve seeing various shapes in clouds.