Desert, Bamas in Judea. From the journey to Palestine

The Judean Desert between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea is one of the most austere landscapes in the region, and Bamas — a small settlement in this area — gave Ciągliński material for one of the most dramatically spare paintings in his Palestine series. The Judean desert had immense biblical and Christian ascetic associations as the site of Jesus's forty days of temptation and the refuge of early Christian hermits. Ciągliński's treatment, characteristically empirical, records the desert as landscape — an extreme environment of rock, dust, and light — rather than resorting to devotional or Romantic dramatization of its spiritual associations. The starkness of the result is itself a kind of honesty about the land.

The composition is dominated by bare rock and dry soil rendered in ochres and russets, with the sky a bleached, high-key tone above. Brushwork is direct and unlabored, capturing the textural bareness of a landscape stripped of vegetation, with the painting's emptiness serving as formal as well as documentary statement.