The Old Debate Wears New Skin

There was a time when art theorists fought like theologians over which of the visual arts was supreme. Painting or sculpture? Castiglione waved his chisel; Cellini roared with marble dust on his boots. But that quaint quarrel, once so vital to the Renaissance ego, now seems as charmingly obsolete as powdered wigs.

Yet every so often, an artist arrives who takes that dusty discourse and revives it—not through polemic, but through practice.

Enter Michał Łukasiewicz, a painter who sculpts with light. His portraits don’t merely depict faces; they manifest presences, as if Caravaggio had risen from the dead and set up a workshop in rural Poland with a palette soaked in silence and memory.

Acrylic Alchemy: Sculpting with Paint

Łukasiewicz’s portraits—predominantly monochrome yet pierced with bursts of high-key color—don’t sit on the canvas. They emerge from it, slow and spectral. Using acrylics like a surgeon wielding a scalpel, he builds his works in palimpsestic layers: painting, scraping, washing, revealing. What remains is less a surface than a skin.

The key is building a work by removing as well as adding layers, I often paint several pieces simultaneously, as I must allow for drying and curing… the process is as much about time as it is about technique.

– Łukasiewicz says.

It’s a method closer to carving than painting, and it shows. His faces possess weight—not just emotional, but visual and spatial. They seem to hover between dimensional states, like ghosts who’ve forgotten whether they’re real.

The Secret Sculpture Beneath the Canvas

At the heart of his realism lies an unusual secret: a clay head.

To capture precise lighting, Łukasiewicz sculpts his own models—not in pigment, but in clay—then bathes them in controlled studio light. This head, mute and handmade, becomes the oracle for shadow and shine. From it he translates light’s choreography onto canvas, allowing him to conjure imaginary sitters who are paradoxically more real than many living subjects.

These are not portraits of people; they are portraits of perception.

I want to create convincingly realistic portraits of nonexistent people—those who feel familiar yet never were.

– Says the artist.

Atmosphere Over Anatomy

In a world drunk on likeness and digital precision, Łukasiewicz’s art is a welcome intoxication of mood over mimesis. His portraits care little for identity, and everything for essence. There’s a hush in his paintings, a kind of visual whisper. No background noise. No clutter. Just figure and void, breath and absence.

His color logic furthers this psychological space: ochres, siennas, foggy blues—quiet hues that recall both Giotto and old wallpaper. But then, without warning, a slice of fuchsia or acid green. And yet it never shouts. The silence remains.

To me, applying colors is about contrast—but also about restraint. The mood must always prevail.

– writes the artist.

From Antwerp to Puławy: A Return and a Rebirth

Born in Puławy, Poland in 1974, Łukasiewicz spent over two decades in Antwerp—studying the Old Masters in situ, perhaps even breathing in their linseed ghosts. Self-taught, he refined his style through years of quiet rebellion against academicism. He never went to art school; instead, he painted his own curriculum, one mistake at a time.

Now back in Puławy, his practice is quieter, more intimate. Gone are the gallery circuits of Belgium and France; instead, he sells directly to collectors, allowing his art to bypass the sterile glare of white cubes. This independence grants him space—literal and emotional—to experiment and evolve.

A New Form of Hybrid

Łukasiewicz’s genius is not in resurrecting the old painting-versus-sculpture debate, but in rendering it moot. His works are both. And neither. And more.

They echo Vasari’s idea that all plastic arts stem from drawing—the spine beneath the skin of painting and sculpture alike. But Łukasiewicz adds flesh, soul, and melancholy. His portraits feel sculpted not just from paint, but from memory.

This is not hyperrealism. This is hyperpresence.

The Signature of Silence

And perhaps that’s why Łukasiewicz doesn’t need to sign his paintings. You know them. Like you know the scent of a familiar room, or the feel of certain air before a storm.

No other painter today merges craft and emotion, sculpture and shadow, the seen and the suggested quite like him.

In the end, it’s not about which art form is greater. It’s about which one can haunt you longer. And Michał Łukasiewicz’s work doesn’t leave. It lingers—in the corner of your eye, the back of your mind, the hush behind your heartbeat.