The series of six stained-glass windows, located in the Roman Catholic Parish Church of St Pancras, was realised in 1993 by Jan Janczak (b. 1938) as part of the restoration of the interior of the building, which had been underway since 1991. With his unconventional design, combining the poetics of surrealism and expressionism, the artist skilfully wove modern trends in figurative painting into the historic, late-Gothic, 17th-century architecture.

Unconventional approach

The glass compositions were situated in the soaring Gothic window niches of the transept. In a series of six panels, Janczak abandoned the canonical method of building a narrative of the Salvation story based solely on episodes from the Bible, freely interweaving scenes from the Old and New Testaments with iconographic elements drawn from contemporary and prehistoric times. This decision determined that, in addition to depictions of the Tower of Babel, the Ten Commandments, the Transfiguration, the Last Supper, the Veraicon (St Veronica's veil with which she wiped Christ's face on the way to Golgotha), the Entombment, the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, the Three Kings and Noah's Ark, the series includes images of a car accident, a giraffe or a dinosaur.

Inspirations for the compositions

The glass compositions were inspired by the transformations in 20th century art, including, among other things, the trend for a revival of sacred art, initiated in the 1920s in France. This revival was associated with a move away from the illusionism in stained glass, characteristic of the 19th century and the beginning of the following century. Experimental attempts to develop new formulas for the field encompassed both technology and iconography, resulting in the creation of so-called artists' stained glass (vitraux d'artistes), which artists produced on commissions from cooperating state authorities and ecclesiastical instances. It is in this trend, which in the 1990s increasingly leaned towards figuration, that Janczak's choice of means of expression and aesthetic conventions should be seen as the source.

Janczak's panels in St Pancrac's Church, which shimmer in a variety of colours depending on the lighting, although largely maintained in the colour tones of sky and earth, make the interior of the building unreal, attracting attention with the intensity of their colours and the oneiric nature of the project created by the artist. The predominance of blue tones and the poetic nature of the iconography (animals and ephemeral, sometimes hovering elongated human silhouettes) make these stained glass windows reminiscent of the oneiric compositions of the Vitebsk-based Jewish artist considered one of the precursors of French Expressionism, Marc Chagall (1887-1985).

The series against the background of Jan Janczak's work

The themes of the series reflect Janczak's creative interest in metaphysics, dreams and popular culture developed in his paintings from the 1960s onwards, which has sometimes been interpreted as an expression of naive, folkloric stylisation and the artist's conscious play with the convention of surrealism. From the 1970s onwards, the artist takes up the themes of pain, loss and mourning present in the Boswil series in the form of episodes from the life of Chritus. Since the 1980s, Janczak has been developing a stylistic language dominated by figures with elongated silhouettes, and has also experimented with stained glass. The realisation in the Church of St Pankracy is the result of the positive reception of the artist's earlier glass compositions realised, among others, in the Church of the Good Shepherd in Lustenau (1989) and the castle chapel in Schwarzenbach (1989).