oil on canvas, 135 × 180 cm
Available on request
Afterimages of Travel isn’t about landscapes so much as what landscapes leave behind– memory-frames that return without warning. The series moves on two tracks: intimate, like a private album, and geographic, like a map of experience; its starting point is not the “view” itself, but the trace it leaves inside.
Afterimages of Travel grows out of an old human drive: the urge to cross a threshold, to reach terra incognita–and an equally strong pull to return to the source, to a first idea of “home.” Witkowski describes this period as metaphorical realism: recognisable scenes act as gateways into memory, emotion, and meaning that reveals itself slowly.
The series runs in two registers. One is inward: paintings that read like pages from a private archive (Waiting, Pirates’ Island, Śmigus-dyngus, Love. Two Sisters). The other is outward: afterimages of places across continents (Wild Africa?, Faun’s Courtship, The Hutsul, Almost Whole, Baikal, Three Saints, Under the Wings of the Mongolian Sun, The Labyrinth of St Ivan of Rila). It remains open, because memory doesn’t close when the journey ends.
Afterimages of Travel begins as a question about the meaning of departure. We will never know who made the first journey–or why. But it likely started with a break from safety: the ancient instinct to seek terra incognita, returning today in new forms even when the world seems “mapped.” In this series, however, travel is not a catalogue of places. It is a way of touching the source–as if every departure also searches for a first idea of “home.”
The paintings unfold along two lines. One is intimate: a passage through private scenes kept in a personal archive. Waiting holds the focus of motherhood–calm, tenderness, and a shadow of sadness shaped by light. Pirates’ Island turns childhood props into talismans of courage. Śmigus-dyngus is built as a collision: a colourful child with a water gun set against a monochrome war document–water against steel, play against cruelty. Love. Two Sisters suspends closeness inside a cinnabar field that reads almost like a sign.
The other line is geographic: places carried as memory-frames–Africa and Greece, Hutsulshchyna, Siberia (Baikal), Romania, Mongolia, Bulgaria. This is metaphorical realism: the visible world becomes a trigger, and the painting becomes the afterimage–the trace of experience.
oil on canvas, 130 × 180 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 130 × 180 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 140 × 190 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 140 × 180 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 140 × 180 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 150 × 190 cm
Available on request
oil on canvas, 135 × 180 cm
Available on request
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