Text by Irina RUSINOVICH
Born 1981 in Poland. Lives and works in Krakow.
Sebastian Ścigalski has spent two years making the same painting, and the six canvases gathered here show how much difference that leaves room for. Each measures 170 by 130 centimetres, close enough to the height of a standing person that the encounter turns physical before it turns visual. Each does exactly one thing, carrying a colour down the full height of the canvas until it arrives somewhere else entirely. Krakow, where he lives and works, spends half the year under a flat grey sky. The paintings read as one long answer to that.
Left: TONALE 002 by Sebastian Ścigalski (170 x 130 cm, 2025, acrylic on canvas). Right: TONALE 003 (170 x 130 cm, 2025, acrylic on canvas)
The two canvases from 2025 were made to be seen together. TONALE 002 begins in bare linen along the top and falls through yellow and orange into a crimson that owns the entire lower half. TONALE 003 runs the same journey upside down, opening in ultramarine at the ceiling of the picture and landing in linen at its floor. What holds attention in both is the untouched cloth, which Sebastian treats as the brightest value he has available, so the light in these paintings arrives out of the fabric itself. Anyone who has stretched a canvas knows how raw linen looks under a work lamp at two in the morning, and he has decided that sight is worth keeping in the finished painting.
Left: TONALE 004 by Sebastian Ścigalski (170 x 130 cm, 2026, acrylic on canvas). Right: TONALE 006 (170 x 130 cm, 2026, acrylic on canvas)
The 2026 canvases release the linen and run edge to edge. TONALE 004 descends from deep blue through cyan and cream into orange before settling in crimson. TONALE 006 sets a near black violet against a saturated orange and takes the longest possible route between them. Side by side the pair gives away where Sebastian actually spends his attention, which is the middle. He chooses colours that sit opposite one another on the wheel, and the zone where they cancel throws off neutrals belonging to neither parent, pale and slightly dirty and impossible to name. That band is the subject of the painting, and everything above and below it functions as delivery.
Left: TONALE 001 by Sebastian Ścigalski (170 x 130 cm, 2025, acrylic on canvas). Right: TONALE 005 (170 x 130 cm, 2026, acrylic on canvas)
The final pair contains the whole development of the series. TONALE 001 holds a pale luminous band across its middle and then drops into deep navy with something close to a hard edge, which hands the painting a horizon and a floor, and horizons invite landscape whether or not the painter wants the invitation accepted. TONALE 005 answers it directly a year later. The composition mirrors itself, linen at the top, orange, a dark violet mass through the centre, orange again, linen at the bottom, so the canvas reads identically whichever direction the eye travels. Symmetry removes the horizon and takes the sky along with it, leaving the transition itself with nothing available to convert it into. The paintings from 2025 were still in conversation with weather, and the ones from 2026 have quietly ended it.
These canvases measure how long a person is willing to stand still. Whether they hold past the first encounter depends on the room, the hour and the person standing in it, and the artist appears to treat that dependency as the working condition of the practice.
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Sebastian Ścigalski (b. 1981, Poland) holds a degree in graphic arts from the University of Silesia. Recent selections include an international presentation by Art Seeding in Dubai, finalist status in the 7th Leon Wyczołkowski National Painting Competition, and the online exhibition Color as Concept by Ambrose Creatives. He held a public exhibition in the streets of Krakow in 2025.
sebastianscigalski.com · @sebastian_scigalski_art
Text by Irina Rusinovich for Purplehaze Magazine
