There are works of art that yield themselves quickly. A glance is enough: we see, we categorize, we move on. But then there are works like Beksiński’s Untitled (1980). This piece resists us, refuses the easy gesture of recognition. It is not titled. It is not explained. It simply exists—dark, massive, almost familiar, and yet wholly alien.
The first impulse is to name what we see. It suggests a face, but it is not a face. The suggestion is strong—the lips heavy, the hollows above them forming what could be nostrils, the sheer verticality of the form monumental in its human echo. But look again and the illusion wavers. It also suggests a building. The grid-like structures, the latticework of scaffolding, the hollow cavities illuminated faintly by light—all could belong to some crumbling tower or futuristic ruin. And yet, it is not a building either. It remains in the liminal space between categories, simultaneously both and neither.
When faced with such an image, one must ask: what remains when the mind exhausts its comparisons? If it is not a face, and not a building, then what is it? The answer, perhaps, is disarmingly simple. It is what it is. Dark lines, receding grids, orange mist, faint light, forms that resonate with recognition without ever collapsing into certainty.
This is the defiance that I love in art—the way certain works stretch us, force us to dwell in ambiguity, to linger longer than we expected. Such a painting is not consumed in an instant; it resists being digested, interpreted, or explained away. Instead, it holds us in suspension. In that suspension, something opens.
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once wrote that perception is not simply about recognizing objects, but about being caught up in their presence, about the way they strike us before we have words. Beksiński seems to insist on this: he withholds titles, he avoids explanation, he denies us the closure of definition. In doing so, he asks us to encounter the work directly, to sit with its presence rather than its meaning.
Yet presence alone is not passive. The painting works on me as I look at it. The almost-face unsettles, the almost-building looms, and in their unresolved tension I feel my own need for clarity exposed. I want to name, to explain, to settle—but the work will not let me. In this way, it mirrors life itself. Much of existence resists neat categories; much of what we experience is ambiguous, liminal, unresolved. We strain for answers, but sometimes we are only left with appearances—shifting, elusive, and yet profoundly real.
Is Beksiński “saying” something here? Perhaps, or perhaps not. He may be speaking in silence, allowing the image to exist as its own reality, unburdened by narrative. Or he may be leaving the act of meaning-making entirely to the viewer. In either case, the point seems to be that meaning is not delivered, but discovered—or even invented—in the encounter.
For me, the painting becomes less about what it represents and more about what it does. It unsettles me. It absorbs me. It resists me. And by resisting me, it stretches me—teaching me to linger, to stay with the unresolved, to resist my own desire for quick answers.
That is why I return to works like this. They defy us, yes, but they also train us in patience, in attentiveness, in the acceptance of ambiguity. They remind us that not all things can be explained away, and that sometimes the greatest gift art offers is the chance to simply sit in the presence of what cannot be named.