Łukasz Huculak: Essays
-
Greyness in the tone of Vanitas
We wear it under our skin, which is plausibly the most fascinating phenomenon in these circumstances: we are a constant and continuously recurring, live symbol of our own transience, the closest and handiest exemplum of the situation. We never part with it, and if we eventually do, it means we cease to exist...
-
Death. Between Heroism, Crime and Sickness
The most frequently quoted example of the suicide perceived as heroism is the Japanese kamikaze pilots, who during World War II performed desperate suicidal attacks on American targets.
-
Inner Masks of His Soul
The only definite thing we can say about a skull is that it is just a residuum, a remainder of a live body that became a corpse and was irrevocably reduced to ashes. That is it. Nothing more.
-
The governor is gone
The governor is gone. The last clerks are leaving official buildings, carrying leather briefcases with an embossed coat of arms and a motto in letters of gold. The coachmen are getting onto the boxes.
-
The Downfall of the Sorcerer Hermogenes by Luca d'Ussula
In his monumental monograph, Früh-Renaissance der Italienischer Malerei (Basel, 1895) Bürckberg says that as a result of conflict between the houses of Ghirerdini and Tommasi families, the Ghirerdini grave chapel was plundered by troops led by the famous condottiere, Sigismondo Malabraccio, who then sold the stolen altar to the cardinal Pompeo Caraffa, later to become Pope Hadrian VI.
-
The world consoled
If we accept Valery’s words that truth and life are disorder, admitting that art is a search for order is just one step further.
-
The Durability of Things
A painting exists physically, but it is generally considered to be a different kind of object from others known to us from everyday experience, even if it represents the most ordinary things. "Although canvas and paints (...) belong to the world, the painter takes them out from among things: because he has chosen them and arranged them according to a secret(...)". To us, three words are significant in this quotation: chose, arranged, secret.
