‘the quest for the universal beauty must find him ever mounting the heavenly ladder, stepping from rung to rung’

(Plato, Symposium 211c)

In Easter Ladder, Orlik depicts what appears to be a climbing frame in a children’s playground, lovingly constructed with a child’s enjoyment of building blocks. The playground extends into the distance creating a whole city made up and inter-connected by different shapes and segments like a jumble of building blocks placed into an ordered mini-world. It creates a structure that has a hallucinatory and playful realism which asks us to delve beyond what we see.

Orlik’s titles playfully offer clues to direct our minds and suggest interpretations. Thus, with Easter Ladder we are directed towards a Christian interpretation. However, Orlik’s symbols are secularised so that the image carries ‘a whole bundle of meanings’, which we should not restrict to a rigid interpretation along any one line: ‘to do so [is] worse than mutilate it – it is to annihilate, to annul it as an instrument of cognition.’ (Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, 1961, p. 15). Eliade states that ‘the life of modern man is swarming with half-forgotten myths, decaying hierophanies and secularised symbols. The progressive de-sacralisation of modern man has altered the content of his spiritual life without breaking the matrices of his imagination: a quantity of mythological litter still lingers in the ill-controlled zones of the mind.’ (Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, 1961, p. 18). Orlik’s paintings are so compelling because they haunt our imaginations, and we perceive them with a reawakening of half-understanding and half-remembering. His imagery carries the richness and force of all historical and mystical interpretations and adds twentieth and twenty-first century understandings such that, ‘Each new valorisation of an archetypal Image crowns and consummates the earlier ones.’ (Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, 1961, p. 164).

In the drawing, some structural blocks reconfigure themselves as a figure (blue torso and arm) who leans out of a window. His head is created by an orange funnel which has black lines around its rim, suggestive of Christ’s crown of thorns. Behind the head there is an oval shape which resembles a candle flame like a halo or mandorla, the almond-shaped frame that surrounds an iconographic figure. In the symbolism of Hildegard of Bingen the mandorla symbolises the Cosmos. In Eastern Orthodox icons, the mandorla depicts sacred moments transcending time and space such as the Resurrection and Transfiguration of Christ. Christ was allegorically depicted as a stag in medieval bestiaries and here, antler-shaped branches grow out of the funnel-shape, offering shamanic connection between the spirit and material world. The branches are shaped like a person stealthily running away and this references both Orlik’s painting The Fortress that the Wind and Rain Created and Hieronymus Bosch’s St John the Baptist (in Meditation) (after 1488, Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid) which has a small root shaped like a man at the bottom of the painting. A segment beneath the ‘figure’ transforms into a person prostrating themself in worship.

A black shape, like a reversed comma, punctuates the structure like the black yin half of a yin yang symbol. Yin represents the moon which is significant for Easter as the date of Easter is determined by the first full moon (the Paschal Full Moon) that occurs after the spring equinox. Easter is the time of the death and resurrection of Christ which may be signified by the cycle of the waxing and waning moon. A corbel that looks like a wing has another subtle yin yang symbol beneath what looks like a pointed angel’s wing. Above it, another piece of the building looks like both angel’s and cockerel’s wing, with arch-shaped decoration replicating feathers. The structure then transforms into a cockerel with a curved tail feather behind and it is crowned with a three-pronged comb on top of its head; it has two black eyes, and its beak is formed by a triangular shaped segment. A cloak which is a cloud floats out behind the figure, and this adds to the majesty of the cockerel, whose comb looks like a crown. It is the king of the castle, a knight and angel. A cheerful flag flies on a tower in the distance adding to the sense of medieval splendour. The cockerel could be a reference to the cockerel that crowed at Easter when Peter thrice denied Jesus and could represent the new beginning promised by the resurrection.

The ladder references Jacob’s ladder (Genesis, Chapter 28) in which Jacob dreamed of a ladder on which angels ascend and descend to the heavens. Thus, by Orlik using the ladder in terms of Easter, he represents the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, a subject that he portrays in his painting Time Reversed. The ladder has seven steps (one is hidden behind the wing), and this presents an undertone of alchemy, whereby the ladder symbolises the seven-step process and levels of consciousness that lead to transformation. Ladders represent the connection between the earth and the celestial world, like a vertical bridge in several religions including Hinduism and Egyptian (Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, Studies in Religious Symbolism, 1961, p. 45 and p. 50). As Eliade explains, the ladder ‘gives plastic expression to the break through the planes necessitated by the passage from one mode of being to another.’ (p. 50) The ladder, thus, plays a part in initiation rites and funeral rituals as the ‘act of climbing or ascending symbolises the way towards the absolute reality.’ (p. 51). For Orlik, this deep, spiritual reality is as real as material reality – there is no separation between the two. His quantum world (of external matter and energy) meets the mystical world (of inner thought, imagination and inspiration). Orlik described his method as: ‘The representational depiction of the outward form combined with the invisible but more important inner life. The materialist culture denies the existence of the invisible even though the inner is all there is, the outer is a garment, a mask.’ (‘Let the Spirit be Moved’, 1994)