'It's just a landscape,' Henry Orlik remarked when asked about Window. The deflection is characteristic, the modesty performative. For the window has been one of the most psychologically charged motifs in Western art since the Romantic era, and no painter who has spent decades contemplating the boundary between interior consciousness and exterior reality could be unaware of its accumulated meanings. When Caspar David Friedrich positioned his wife, Caroline, at an open casement in Woman at a Window (1822, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin), he was not merely recording a domestic scene; he was articulating what would become a central preoccupation of modern art: the threshold between confinement and freedom, between the known self and the unknowable beyond. Orlik's painting participates in this tradition while utterly transforming it.

The work was painted in New York between 1982 and 1984, during a period when Orlik was moving between hotels, each relocation a passage into what he described as 'another reality'. The biographical context is crucial: from the actual windows of temporary accommodation, the artist contemplated the contrast between interior safety and exterior uncertainty. 'We're safe here,' he observed of the space within the window, 'but what's out there is different. The unknown: we don't know what's coming. What's on the horizon.' This is the existential condition the window motif has encoded for two centuries: the paradox of shelter that is also a limitation, of protection that is also imprisonment. Edward Hopper understood this when he painted Hotel Window (1955, Forbes Collection), positioning an elegantly dressed woman in an anonymous hotel lobby, staring into darkness beyond the glass. Hopper, who protested that critics overdid 'the loneliness thing', nonetheless wrote that 'so much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously.' Orlik's dismissal of his own painting as 'just a landscape' operates in precisely this register: the conscious mind deflects what the work itself insists upon.

Yet if the window represents psychological thresholds, Orlik has done something remarkable with the convention. Rather than placing a contemplative figure before the aperture, gazing outward like Friedrich's Caroline or Salvador Dalí's sister Ana María in Young Woman at a Window (1925, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), Orlik has removed the human intermediary altogether. We ourselves become the figure at the window. The dark frame surrounds us; we are inside, looking out at a world divided into four elemental quadrants. The painting does not depict someone else's longing or entrapment; it places the viewer directly in the psychological space of contemplation, making us both prisoner and philosopher, confined body and questing mind.

The cosmological framework derives from Orlik's art school education, where he encountered the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles of Acragas (c.490–430 BCE), who proposed that four eternal, unchanging 'roots' constitute all matter: fire, air, water, and earth. Aristotle championed this theory, which dominated Western thought for nearly two millennia. Orlik also absorbed the atomic theory of Democritus (c.470–400 BCE), who conceived of reality as solid particles held together mechanically, a concept modern physics has transformed by replacing mechanics with energy. It is precisely this bridge between ancient philosophy and contemporary quantum theory that animates Orlik's 'excitations'. Yet one might ask why an artist painting in late twentieth-century New York would structure a composition around ideas articulated in fifth-century Sicily. The answer lies in the window itself: Orlik is not illustrating a diagram of ancient cosmology but rather visualising what lies beyond the glass when one has stripped away the contingent, the temporal, the merely circumstantial. What remains when the streets of Manhattan fall away? The elements. The primal forces. The building blocks of existence itself.

The composition divides into four interpenetrating zones. In the upper left quadrant, a tree-like form blazes with warm hues of orange, ochre, and deep green, rising from rolling plains. This is fire, rendered not as a destructive conflagration but as vital energy, the transformative principle Empedocles placed at the heart of cosmic change. Orlik acknowledged that the form resembles certain wooden decorative objects he has kept for sixty years, purchased from Harrods during one of their legendary sales. These carved forms, which he likened to calla lilies or anthuriums, possess an organic suggestiveness that recalls Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. O'Keeffe's Yellow Calla (1926, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.) invited Freudian interpretations that the artist famously resisted, insisting instead on the primacy of close looking. 'They're quite feminine,' Orlik observed of his wooden flowers, acknowledging associations that emerge naturally from organic shapes. The excitations in this quadrant create the impression of flickering heat, of energy perpetually on the verge of transformation.

The upper right quadrant presents a cooler, more placid scene: distant hills recede towards a horizon where land dissolves into atmosphere. This is air, the breath of existence, rendered in pale blues and greens that suggest limitless expansion. Shrub-like forms in the foreground, their colours ranging from teal to mauve, anchor the composition while the background opens into apparent infinity. The sky itself pulses with excitation, each mark a particle of atmosphere made visible. One thinks of the atmospheric investigations of J.M.W. Turner, particularly his late works such as Rain, Steam, and Speed (1844, National Gallery, London), in which solid form dissolves into pure luminosity. Orlik achieves something comparable through accumulation rather than dissolution: his air is constructed from countless tiny particles that collectively suggest boundlessness. Yet for the figure at the window, this boundlessness remains forever beyond reach, visible but unattainable, beautiful but barred.

The lower left quadrant plunges into cooler depths. Here, water dominates, flowing through the composition in sinuous curves of blue, grey, and white. A pale form, which Orlik described as resembling a reclining woman with her head and hair dissolving and tumbling into cascading water, introduces an anthropomorphic element that links the elemental to the human. This figure, if it is a figure, lies among stones, surrounded by the perpetual movement of liquid. The river motif carries profound associations in Western art: from Leonardo da Vinci's studies of water dynamics to the nocturnal rivers of Arnold Böcklin's The Isle of the Dead (1880–86, various versions, including Kunstmuseum Basel). In Orlik's vision, water is not a mere substance but a living force, the element Empedocles associated with the deity Nestis, 'who moistens with her tears the mortal fountain.' The figure in the water, if we accept her presence, becomes a kind of naiad or undine, a spirit of the element itself, forever flowing, forever unreachable from the room where we stand.

Earth occupies the lower-right quadrant, where a deer's head emerges from rocky terrain, its antlers rising like bare branches against a muted sky. The antler motif recurs throughout Orlik's oeuvre, serving multiple symbolic functions: antlers connect the earthly creature to the arboreal realm above; they are shed and regrown annually, embodying cycles of death and renewal; they crown the deer as nature's heraldic beast. The presence of the deer invokes hunting imagery with deep art-historical roots, from the cave paintings of Lascaux through the aristocratic hunt scenes of the Renaissance to Franz Marc's expressionist animals of the early twentieth century. Marc's Deer in the Forest II (1914, Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich) sought to capture animal consciousness from within; Orlik's deer, by contrast, appears as an emissary of Earth itself, grounded yet gazing upward towards elements beyond its domain. The animal seems to look back at us through the window, as if aware of our presence in the darkened room.

What distinguishes Window from a mere diagram of ancient cosmology is the way Orlik allows these elements to interpenetrate. The river does not stop at an arbitrary boundary but flows into the air quadrant, where it merges with distant hills that dissolve into clouds. Fire's warmth radiates across the composition, affecting the temperature of adjacent zones. The earth quadrant's rocky formations share formal qualities with the fire quadrant's plains. Orlik observed that the excitations around the fire zone take shapes suggestive of animals: elephants, zebras, perhaps, as though the primal landscape contained all creatures in potentia. This teeming, generative quality recalls Piero di Cosimo's The Forest Fire (c.1505, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford), a painting Orlik has visited and admired. Piero's work, inspired by Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (c.55 BCE), depicts terrified animals fleeing a conflagration, some bearing strange hybrid features, satyrs' heads on deer or pigs. 'Fantastic painting,' Orlik remarked of Piero's masterpiece, recognising a kindred spirit across five centuries.

René Magritte explored the window's philosophical implications in The Human Condition(1933, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.), where a canvas depicting a landscape stands before the window it ostensibly represents, collapsing the distinction between representation and reality. 'The problem of the window,' Magritte wrote, led him to paint what he considered an analogy for 'how we see the world: we see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of it that we experience inside ourselves.' Orlik's window operates differently. Rather than questioning the relationship between perception and reality, it accepts the division between inside and outside as fundamental to human experience. The dark frame is frankly acknowledged as a barrier. The primeval landscape beyond is not a painting within a painting but a vision of what the mind constructs when it looks past the contemporary, the urban, the temporary towards something older and more enduring.

The chromatic organisation deserves particular attention. Warm and cool tones alternate diagonally: fire (warm) and water (cool) occupy opposing corners, as do air (cool) and earth (warm). This arrangement creates visual balance while honouring the ancient understanding of elemental opposition. Empedocles conceived of each element as possessing two of four fundamental qualities: heat, cold, wetness, dryness. Fire is hot and dry; water is cold and wet; air is hot and wet; earth is cold and dry. Adjacent elements share one quality, enabling transformation between them, while opposite elements share none, maintaining eternal distinction. Orlik's colour choices intuitively reflect this philosophical schema, with transitions between quadrants marking the boundaries where one quality yields to another.

The square format reinforces the quaternary structure. Unlike the rectangle, which implies hierarchy between horizontal and vertical, the square distributes weight equally across its four sides. This formal democracy suits a composition in which no element dominates another. The perfect balance recalls the mandalas of Eastern spiritual tradition; geometric configurations intended as aids to meditation and as representations of cosmic order. Carl Jung understood the mandala as a symbol of psychic wholeness, the integration of opposing tendencies into a unified self. Whether or not Orlik consciously invoked such associations, Window achieves a comparable sense of completeness: all aspects of material existence are contained within a single, encompassing vision.

Yet the window frame complicates this wholeness. We may see everything, but we cannot enter. The German poet Novalis wrote that 'everything at a distance turns into poetry: distant mountains, distant people, distant events: all becomes Romantic.' The window makes distance perpetual, romance permanent, and fulfilment impossible. This is the psychological condition that twentieth-century artists returned to obsessively: Henri Matisse's open windows onto Mediterranean harbours in works such as Open Window, Collioure (1905, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.) promised liberation through colour, yet the frame remained. Pierre Bonnard's windows in his Normandy interiors, including The Open Window (1921, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.), concentrated a sense of longing in the blue sky and green foliage beyond the glass. For Orlik, painting during a depressive period following a robbery, moving between temporary lodgings in an overwhelming city, the window offered both escape and a reminder: here is what exists, here is what remains beyond reach.

The painting returned to England, rolled in a tube, one among hundreds of works from Orlik's American period. 'Imagine unravelling that and finding that,' one might say; but for Orlik, such discoveries were commonplace, the accumulated production of decades spent in relative obscurity. Now, in a gallery context, viewers encounter Window and experience what Orlik imagined when he suggested it might hang 'at the end of a room': the painting draws one forward, offering passage from the gallery's defined space into limitless landscape, from the present moment into the primordial past. We become, collectively, the figure Friedrich never quite painted: not looking over someone else's shoulder at what they see through the glass, but standing ourselves at the threshold, confronting our own containment, our own longing.

'Evolution,' Orlik noted during the discussion of this work, is a single word that opens vast interpretive possibilities. The four elements represent not static categories but stages in an endless process of becoming. Fire transforms earth into air through combustion; water erodes earth and evaporates into the atmosphere; air circulates fire's heat and carries water's moisture. Nothing remains fixed. The excitations that cover every surface of this canvas embody this perpetual flux at the smallest scale, each spiralling mark a quantum of energy participating in universal change. In this sense, Window reconciles ancient cosmology with modern physics, demonstrating that the intuitions of Empedocles and Democritus, however imprecise in detail, grasped something essential about the energetic nature of matter.

It is not just a landscape. It never was. It is both a window onto a primeval world and a mirror reflecting our condition: creatures of consciousness, trapped in rooms of our own making, longing for the elemental, the primal, the free, yet forever separated by the glass we cannot break, the frame we cannot escape, the distance that makes everything beautiful precisely because we cannot possess it. Orlik may deflect with characteristic modesty, but the painting says what the artist will not.