Pompeiian Mosaic c. 1950 - 1955

Leonard Pytlak made this mysterious print, Pompeiian Mosaic, with marks that read like an explosion in a tile factory. I can imagine Pytlak, brush in hand, circling the canvas, deciding where to strike next. It’s as if he were trying to unearth something, excavating the surface with layers of red and brown washes, punctuated by those sharp, dark lines that cut through the hazy ground. And what about that central form, like lace or shattered pottery? The image is ghostly but seems to evoke a sense of time, history, and the layering of memory. The colour relationships alone evoke so much. Pytlak, like all artists, is having a conversation with the past, with the ancient city of Pompeii, but also with the abstract expressionists and the surrealists, as if trying to capture the buried and fragmented nature of existence itself. So, when we look at this work, we're not just seeing an image, we're participating in a dialogue that spans centuries.