A fortified city rises against a tumultuous sky, its crenelated towers and Gothic pinnacles ascending in vertiginous defiance of gravity. In Battlement, Henry Orlik constructs an architectural vision that hovers between a medieval stronghold and a fevered hallucination, a citadel whose very stones seem to breathe and undulate beneath his characteristic spiralling brushwork. The composition tilts dramatically, as though the viewer were falling towards or away from this impossible edifice, creating a profound sense of spatial disorientation that recalls Giovanni Battista Piranesi's celebrated Carceri d'invenzione (c. 1745–61, various collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Like Piranesi, Orlik renders architecture as both a sanctuary and a prison, a structure that simultaneously protects and confines. Where the Venetian master employed the etching needle to conjure his labyrinthine dungeons, Orlik achieves comparable spatial anxiety through the accumulation of thousands of minute paint applications, each charged with what he termed the 'excitations of energy at subatomic level'.

The painting's title announces its martial heritage with unflinching directness. A battlement, that distinctively crenelated parapet crowning medieval fortifications, served the dual purpose of protecting defenders whilst permitting them to survey and strike at approaching enemies. The alternating merlons and embrasures that Orlik depicts with such obsessive care across his rooftops carry centuries of military memory within their form: generations of soldiers crouching behind these stone teeth, loosing arrows or musket fire through the gaps before ducking back to safety. For the son of Josef Orlik, who served with Allied forces during the Second World War, such defensive architecture would have carried profound biographical resonance. Josef's wartime service imbued the household with stories of aerial assault, besieged cities, and architectural destruction; the young Henry would have understood instinctively that fortresses, however formidable, remain vulnerable to attack from above.

The evolution of this composition through its preparatory stages reveals a remarkable transformation in Orlik's conception. The initial graphite drawing rendered the fortress in the monochromatic tones one might expect of stone architecture: cool greys, silvered shadows, the austere palette of quarried rock. A subsequent crayon study introduced colour, yet the final painting represents a radical departure from both predecessors. Orlik has entirely abandoned the cold mineral hues appropriate to masonry, suffusing his fortress instead with the fiery warmth of organic matter. Terracotta bleeds into sienna; rose flushes through the towers like blood beneath skin; violet shadows suggest bruising or the livid discolouration of wounded flesh. The walls appear less constructed from hewn stone than grown from living tissue, as though the fortress were not a building at all, but a massive body curled defensively against threat. This corporeal palette constitutes a deliberate and significant artistic choice, collapsing the distinction between architecture and anatomy, between the inorganic and the viscerally alive.

The defensive architecture has metastasised here into something organic and almost sentient. Towers proliferate like cellular growth; windows pierce the masonry like watchful eyes; the stepped gables of what might be Flemish or German Gothic construction lean and converge in configurations that defy structural logic. One thinks of the haunted cityscapes in Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, particularly The Nostalgia of the Infinite (c. 1911–13, Museum of Modern Art, New York), where a monumental tower dominates an empty piazza beneath an oppressive sky. De Chirico wrote of the 'metaphysical aspect' he perceived in the architecture of Turin, particularly its archways and colonnades; Orlik similarly perceives in fortified structures a psychological dimension that transcends their practical function. Yet whereas de Chirico employed hard shadows and geometric precision to evoke foreboding, Orlik achieves a comparable unease through the relentless animation of every surface, his buildings pulsing with an internal vitality that makes them appear almost respiratory, almost muscular, almost capable of feeling pain.

The technique Orlik employs throughout this canvas demonstrates his fully mature 'Quantum Painting' method: an excitation denotes an entity in an elevated energy state that responds to an external stimulus. Orlik transposes this scientific principle into pictorial practice with extraordinary rigour; as he explained in his 1985 treatise 'An Explanation of My Method,' he aimed to capture not merely the visual appearance of his subjects but 'their essence and life force,' revealing what he called the 'living line' that connects all phenomena in an interconnected universe. This philosophical conviction, drawing on both Western physics and Eastern concepts of qi or vital energy, transforms the painted surface into what Orlik described as a 'topography of energy.' By rendering cold stone in the warm palette of living tissue, he enacts this philosophy visually: the fortress becomes a body, the body becomes a fortress, and the distinction between mineral and flesh dissolves into the unified field of consciousness that Orlik believed underlies all apparent reality.

Salvador Dalí explored similar territory in The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory(1954, Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida), fracturing his earlier composition into floating rectangular blocks to suggest atomic dissolution, responding to the revelations of nuclear physics that preoccupied the post-war imagination. Dalí described the atom as his 'favourite food for thought' after the 1945 detonations, and his later work obsessively returned to themes of disintegration and reconstitution. Orlik shares this fascination with the instability underlying apparent solidity, though Dalí approached fragmentation with the precision of a draughtsman, whereas Orlik achieves dissolution through accumulated gesture, each spiralling mark contributing to a shimmering whole that never quite resolves into stasis. 'There is no separateness in reality,' Orlik maintained, drawing on his synthesis of quantum physics and Eastern philosophy; 'everything flows into one another.' The living organic fortress embodies this conviction: stone flows into skin, architecture into organism, the built environment into the biological.

If the fortress reads as a body, then the swirling sky forms take on still more visceral associations: arterial spurts, the movement of blood through vessels, the fiery energies that course through living systems. These clouds curl and writhe with the same spiralling energy that animates the buildings below, creating a visual rhyme between earth and heaven, between the constructed and the elemental, and between the defended interior and the threatening exterior. The sinuous forms offer multiple interpretations: they might represent atmospheric phenomena, storm clouds gathering above the besieged fortress; they could suggest smoke rising from conflagrations within or bombardment without; they evoke equally the movement of celestial spirits traversing the firmament, flame-like entities that recall the angelic hosts of medieval theology. If we read the swirling sky forms as attack, as bombardment raining down upon the citadel, then the blood-coloured walls acquire an agonising dimension: the fortress is not merely under siege but wounded, suffering, bleeding from a thousand invisible cuts.

The colour relationships recall Odilon Redon's work, particularly his later pastels of floating buildings and visionary landscapes, where similarly unexpected chromatic harmonies conjure states of reverie. Redon's The Cyclops (c. 1914, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo) presents a comparable palette of rose, violet, and ochre in the service of a dreamlike vision. Whereas Redon depicted the monstrous eye observing a vulnerable figure, Orlik multiplies the points of surveillance: his fortress bristles with windows and apertures, each a potential site of observation. At the upper left of the composition, a tall window catches pale light, its geometric grid providing respite from organic movement. It functions simultaneously as eye and portal, an aperture through which the fortress might observe the world beyond its walls or through which some unknown luminosity might penetrate its interior darkness. Within Orlik's broader symbolic vocabulary, such fenestration often serves as openings through which eternal principles might penetrate temporal experience, transforming the defensive structure into a site of potential revelation.

The recurring triangular and pyramidal forms throughout the composition, particularly the dark, peaked roofs and pointed dormers, establish a visual rhythm of ascent. These aspiring forms echo the Gothic cathedral builders' ambition to direct the eye and spirit heavenward, yet Orlik's architecture lacks the transcendent clarity of Chartres or Cologne. His towers twist and bend; his rooflines buckle under invisible pressures. The bare branches of a tree visible on a rooftop, winter-stripped and skeletal, reinforce this sense of a world suspended between life and death, growth and decay. Trees with antler-like branches appear throughout Orlik's oeuvre, a motif he traced to his mother Lucyna's curious decision to bring a set of antlers when she fled Soviet-occupied Belarus for England in 1948. Lucyna had survived Nazi labour camps; she and the infant Henry travelled on the Queen Elizabeth with other women and families under the Polish Resettlement Scheme, carrying virtually nothing. When asked why she had salvaged this singular object from the ruins of her former life, Henry recalled her explanation: 'because they are alive, the antlers are alive, like us.' The branch reaching into Battlement's turbulent sky participates in this private mythology, suggesting the persistence of organic life even amid stone fortifications, the vital force that endures despite displacement and destruction.

For displaced peoples, the body is often the only home one can carry across borders. Lucyna fled with virtually nothing except her infant son and those antlers she described as alive; the refugees who populated the resettlement camps of Orlik's childhood had lost houses, cities, entire nations, yet retained the irreducible dwelling of their own flesh. The fortress rendered in corporeal tones might represent the ultimate defensive structure: the skin itself, that vulnerable membrane separating self from world, the final battlement when all other walls have fallen. Francis Bacon explored comparable territory in his screaming popes and contorted figures, where flesh becomes a site of existential anguish; Orlik's approach is less confrontational yet equally unsettling, his architecture acquiring the vulnerability of exposed tissue. The martial interpretation gains biographical resonance through this lens: the son of a wartime veteran, raised on stories of bombardment and siege, would have understood that bodies, like cities, can be wounded, and that skin, like stone, can be breached.

Orlik painted this work in the early 1980s, a period when he divided his time between London and the United States. The American sojourn, which included extended stays in both Los Angeles and New York, exposed him to monumental architecture of a distinctly modern character: the Spanish Colonial villas of Beverly Hills and the Art Deco towers of Manhattan. During his New York years, living in a Wall Street apartment, Orlik experienced the city's skyscrapers as living entities. 'They are watching us,' he observed of the towering structures, though he maintained a combative relationship with their imposing presence: 'they are just there. I can fight them on canvas.' Yet Battlement looks backward rather than forward, conjuring a European cityscape that might belong to any century between the twelfth and the nineteenth. The stepped gables suggest the mercantile cities of the Hanseatic League; the Gothic tracery evokes English Perpendicular or French Flamboyant; the overall silhouette recalls the hill towns of Umbria as much as the fortified cities of the Rhineland. Where the New York skyscrapers presented themselves as cold, mineral, and watching, Orlik's European fortress pulses with warmth and vulnerability, a structure that bleeds rather than merely stands.

This temporal ambiguity places the painting in dialogue with the architectural fantasies of John Martin, whose apocalyptic visions, such as The Fall of Babylon (1831, various versions, including Tate, London), combined meticulous archaeological research with sublime imaginative excess. Martin's toppling ziggurats and conflagrating palaces offered Victorian audiences a vision of divine judgement visited upon human hubris; Orlik's fortress, though not yet fallen, seems perpetually on the verge of some catastrophic transformation. The work also participates in a rich tradition of architectural capriccio that stretches from the Roman wall paintings of Pompeii through the Renaissance vedute ideate to the Romantic ruins of Caspar David Friedrich. Friedrich's Abbey in the Oakwood (1809–10, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin) stages a comparable confrontation between Gothic architecture and natural forces, though Friedrich's ruined abbey succumbs quietly to encroaching nature whilst Orlik's fortress actively joins forces with it, its stones seething with animate energy. The comparison illuminates a fundamental distinction: whereas Friedrich contemplated the inevitable victory of time over human ambition with Protestant melancholy, Orlik refuses such passive acceptance. His architecture struggles, writhes, and transforms itself in desperate resistance to entropy.

The nearly square format of the canvas, unusual for a composition with such pronounced verticality, creates a productive tension between the architecture's upward thrust and the constraints of the picture plane. Rather than permitting the towers to soar freely, Orlik compresses them, forcing their accumulated mass towards the viewer with claustrophobic intensity. The effect recalls the horror vacui of medieval manuscript illumination, where scribes and artists feared empty space, as nature was said to abhor a vacuum. Every inch of Orlik's surface pulses with incident and energy; there is no quiet passage where the eye might rest, no stable ground from which to survey the scene. The tilted perspective reinforces this instability, denying the viewer any comfortable vantage point from which to comprehend the whole. We are perpetually falling into or sliding off this composition, caught in the gravitational field of its massed forms. This vertiginous quality connects to Orlik's understanding of consciousness as existing in what he termed 'specious present': the brief moment in which past perception, current experience, and anticipated future collapse into unified awareness. The painting refuses to settle into any single temporal mode; it exists in perpetual becoming, perpetual wounding, perpetual defence.

The psychological resonance of the fortress theme warrants consideration in light of Orlik's biography. Born in Ankum, Germany, in 1947, the artist spent his early years in displaced persons' camps and Polish resettlement communities scattered across Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds before the family eventually settled in Swindon. The experience of rootlessness, belonging nowhere and everywhere, marked Orlik's sensibility profoundly. A battlement promises security, a walled enclosure against a hostile world, yet it also announces vulnerability, the need for such defences arising only in response to genuine threat. The fortified city Orlik constructs might represent the immigrant's fantasy of belonging, of finding at last a place sufficiently protected against the forces that have repeatedly uprooted one's family and scattered one's people across the continent. This perpetual tension between sanctuary and siege defines the immigrant experience; the displaced person knows that walls, however thick, can be breached, that cities, however ancient, can fall, and that the body itself remains the final redoubt when all other fortifications have crumbled.

Yet the painting resists such comforting interpretation through the very instability of its execution. The walls do not hold firm; the towers cannot be trusted; the whole elaborate defensive apparatus seems on the verge of dissolution or transformation into something wholly other. Carl Jung's concept of the temenos, the sacred precinct or protected psychological space necessary for the work of individuation, finds visual expression here in equivocal form. The battlement surrounds something precious, presumably the self or the psyche, yet the protection it offers proves as mutable and uncertain as the quantum particles from which Orlik derives his painting method. Matter itself, physics now tells us, consists mostly of empty space; the apparent solidity of stone is merely a convenient illusion produced by electromagnetic forces. Orlik's excitations render this scientific truth visible, transforming his medieval fortress into a cloud of probability, a waveform on the verge of collapsing into one state or another. The flesh tones add another dimension to this instability: bodies, unlike buildings, heal, grow, change, die. The fortress that bleeds might also recover; the wounded walls might knit themselves whole; the architectural organism might possess regenerative capacities denied to mere masonry.

The Surrealist movement, provides another essential context for understanding this painting. André Breton's definition of Surrealism as 'psychic automatism in its pure state' finds a curious echo in Orlik's obsessive, spiralling marks, which accumulate through countless hours of concentrated labour yet seem to capture something involuntary and unpremeditated. The architecture that emerges from this process carries the uncanny familiarity of dream imagery, simultaneously recognisable and impossible, logical and absurd. One cannot enter this fortress, cannot walk its corridors or climb its stairs, yet one knows it intimately, has perhaps visited it in sleep, has certainly encountered it in the collective architectural unconscious that stretches from fairy tale to nightmare. As Orlik believed, consciousness operates on multiple-dimensional planes; the painting becomes a site where these dimensions intersect, where the material and spiritual worlds coexist within a unified field of awareness, where stone becomes flesh and flesh becomes sanctuary.

The treatment of light throughout the composition deserves particular attention. No consistent illumination governs the scene; instead, certain surfaces catch radiance whilst others retreat into shadow, according to an internal logic divorced from external solar mechanics. The tall window at the upper left glows with pale luminosity, yet the source of this light remains mysterious. The rose-coloured tower just right of centre seems to generate its own warmth, as though heated from within by some metabolic process, whilst the darker structures surrounding it absorb and extinguish illumination. This inconsistent lighting, reminiscent of the nocturnal glow that suffuses Rembrandt's visionary etchings or the phosphorescent gleam in Gustave Moreau's symbolist fantasies such as Jupiter and Semele (1894–95, Musée National Gustave Moreau, Paris), transforms the buildings into an apparition. The fortress exists in that liminal hour when daylight fades and another order of perception becomes possible, when the rational mind relaxes its grip and older, stranger ways of seeing reassert themselves. Bodies, too, possess their own internal luminosity, their own warmth independent of external sources; the flesh-toned fortress glows with the heat of life itself.

Battlement is one of Orlik's most concentrated meditations on the architecture of protection and confinement, on the structures we build to shelter ourselves from a threatening world and on the paradox that those very structures can become prisons of their own making. The decision to render this fortress in the colours of living flesh rather than dead stone transforms the work from an architectural fantasy into something approaching a visceral allegory: a painting about the body as fortress, the fortress as body, the vulnerable membranes we construct and inhabit, the walls that bleed when breached. The painting refuses resolution, offering neither the comfort of secure enclosure nor the release of open space. Instead, it holds the viewer suspended in a state of perpetual uncertainty, surrounded by walls that shimmer and shift, protected by battlements that might at any moment reveal themselves as skin. This is a psychological portrait, the built environment reimagined as an externalisation of inner states: the refugee's longing for home, the artist's need for a space apart, the universal human desire for safety in a world that offers none. The fortress Orlik constructs exists in that realm where memory and imagination converge, where the castles of childhood reading and the watchtowers of ancestral trauma merge into a single haunted edifice, perpetually rising, perpetually on the verge of collapse, perpetually wounded yet perpetually alive, defended against enemies that may have departed centuries ago or may be approaching even now. Through this intimate yet expansive vision, Orlik creates not simply a portrait of an imagined citadel but a mirror reflecting humanity's eternal dialogue with the forces that threaten to overwhelm us: a fortress built of flesh, defended by blood, animated by the vital energy that courses through all living things.