Krystyna Melnyk
triptych: ‘Impossibility of a Pure Gaze’, 2025, oil on canvas, 175 x 125 cm, 175 x 125 cm; oil on panel, 43 x 45 cm
diptych: ‘Angel of History’, 2022, oil on canvas, 175 x 125 cm, ‘Crucified, There Are Crucified Broken Images on the Path to the Common Good Again’, 2022, oil on canvas, 175 x 125 cm
The artist’s main medium is oil painting. She works with traditional techniques—on canvas and on wooden panels primed with levkas. Krystyna explores the image of the traumatised human body; she argues that the experience of pain and suffering brings us closer to a profound understanding of humanity.
Krystyna’s artistic practice is rooted in her personal history; she has experienced the traumatic loss of loved ones to illness. The artist discovered the deepest experience of love, mediated by the intimacy of a body in decline. Krystyna regards her experience of profound love amid extreme pain as an encounter with the sacred. The artistic language, techniques and imagery she employs draw on these deep experiences. The suffering body serves as a vessel for the spirit and as a material substrate of the truly human. This body-as-subject is an expression of the truly human at the extreme intersection of suffering and love.
“Angel of History” is the first work to appear after the full-scale invasion. It references Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus’ and its interpretation by Walter Benjamin as the angel of history. However, on Krystyna’s canvas, instead of wings, there are backs with wounds inflicted by history: ‘Those who tore off the wings have returned; those who trample flowers with their boots have returned’. In the triptych ‘Impossibility of a Pure Gaze’, the artist records the shift in how the body is perceived under the pressure of wartime; admiration has been supplanted by a sense that the body also belongs to others, since it has the potential to protect us all in the circumstances we find ourselves in. The work exposes a contradiction in the perception of the body. Its mode of presentation alludes both to sensuality through a fragment of the unwounded body of a young man and to the reality of wartime through the metaphor of the wound. The work raises a question of what kind of body society desires during war. The tripartite structure and the combination of traditional techniques—oil on canvas for the side panels and oil on a levkas-primed wooden panel for the centre—suggest a conflict between the temporal and the eternal and recall the tradition of sacred paintings, in which suffering is organically linked to the highest manifestation of absolute love. For this reason, these depictions of the body are not weak; even in the face of pain, they appear majestic and elicit, even if ephemeral, a feeling of admiration.
