In the tragic symbolism of Forgotten Hopes, twelve grey elephant trunks appear on a wall, like trophies receding into the distance implying their number carries on further into the unseeable distance. However, they do not ‘hang’ on the wall like inert, dead and stuffed trophies but are animated, raised in protest, trumpeting, vigorously trying to free themselves or hanging dejectedly downwards searching for, crying out to, their lost tusks which lie on a sea of pink/red blood which laps before them, too far from them to reach.

Orlik animates all of the painting, the trunks, the wall, the ‘sea’, the ‘waves’ with his characteristic excitation strokes of paint which energise and electrify the painting. However, he does not use his excitation technique on the ivory tusks, which makes them solid and unenergized. They are dead, detached from their animated trunks. Like corpses or skeletons on a battleground, they lie in a sea of blood and guilt.

In Orlik’s painting, he depicts a terrible, nightmare world in which there are no more elephants living in the wild but restricted and enwalled, and indicates the tragic reality that their ivory has been and is taken from them for trinkets, carvings and false medicine.