Objects

"Wszyscy razem" [All together] – in keeping with the title – could just as well have been called "All my loved ones". One can relate this to the words of Celnikier himself when he recalled: "Here [in France], over time, visions of the ghetto and the people closest to me began to become more precise. (...) It was necessary to start from the moment when human existence was not yet dehumanised. To find my mother, my sister, Gina [Frydman], untouched, to restore their existence in their light, love, suffering, already beyond the last glances". In the group scene, in addition to those mentioned above, the viewer also sees other people (including children) close to the artist, who portrayed himself in a half-profile bust, just at the right edge of the composition. At the bottom right, we can see a lying figure of the deceased, while on the same side at the top, above a group of people, there is an angel hovering, as if perched on a triangular abutment of a veranda or a window. The figure of an angel appears in Celnikier's paintings from the beginning of the 1960s. | AT