Arkadiusz Pacholski — Teatr świata

(...) Perhaps five years later, in 1996, I was sent a catalogue of works available for purchase from a certain contemporary art gallery in Warsaw. Among more than sixty paintings reproduced therein, many of them truly remarkable, I was most intrigued by Marcin Kołpanowicz’s "The Theater of the World". The painting depicted the ruined interior of an eighteenth-century palace theater, where peeling paint was coming off the green walls in great flakes. In the empty auditorium stood only a few armchairs and chairs, upholstered in yellowish-gold and red drapery, while the red curtain, drawn to the sides, revealed a stage missing several floorboards. The stage itself turned out to be a field overgrown with swaying grain, stretching far into the distance toward the blue mountains on the horizon. Across this sunlit plain, white fluffy clouds drifted slowly; one of them, beneath the valances of the curtain, was just floating into the theater’s interior.

The painting radiated an extraordinary calm, yet at the same time, it was intriguing in its emptiness—a void born from the poignant loneliness of the chairs, the monotonous vastness of the plain, and above all, the total absence of people. Where are those who once sat in the armchairs? Did they go there—"onto the stage"—believing that instead of merely watching life, it is better to create it oneself, to take an active part in it? Or perhaps on the contrary: unwilling to accept what was unfolding before their eyes, they moved away from the auditorium into other rooms of the palace? (...) Was it the gods who watched the mortals, or the other way around: were the people looking toward the gods? Perhaps the gods, terrified by what was happening in the earthly world before their very eyes, departed, not wanting to be viewed as accomplices to the crimes? Or perhaps it was the people who, convinced that the gods themselves had written this bloody play, decided to turn their backs on them as a sign of protest? Personally, I lean toward the first explanation. Nature, which in the form of a cloud, the rot of the stage boards, and the cracks on the walls, was slipping into the theater’s interior, unsettled me with its quiet—yet consistent—expansion into the territory of the kingdom of culture. In Kołpanowicz’s painting, I perceived a symbol of doom—a doom falling upon the world when mortals forget that they are performing before the most demanding audience: an audience composed of perfect beings. (...)

Arkadiusz Pacholski, fragment of the book The Paris Notebook (Brulion Paryski)