The maximisation of colour – this is a topic which Leon Tarasewicz has explored more deeply than any other contemporary artist in Poland. At the same time, this is a subject which cannot be exhausted, just as you cannot reach a place where the landscape ends, and see the whole light filling it.

Nowadays, the consciousness of the climate emergency is forcing post- industrial societies to open their eyes to nature and rethink the position which people occupy in relation to it. Leon Tarasewicz has perceived the relationship with nature as a foundation of culture for decades, since the beginning of his creative career. This relationship also provides a basis for his painting. It is non-figurative imagery, exceeding the category of abstraction. Each of the paintings by Tarasewicz – irrespective of whether it is an easel picture or one of the immersive, spatial painting installations created by the artist – is based on what he observes. None depicts anything. In this painting, the picture’s surface is space, the rhythm is a structure for colours, while colour is a fruit of the meeting between matter and light. The compositions by Tarasewicz are open, because the world cannot be closed in a single scene; we always immerse ourselves in its fragments.

The same applies to the latest paintings, in which Tarasewicz deals with the category of brightness. Do these works reverberate with the visual echo of the fields of tulips seen in the Netherlands by the artist? Or maybe it is about the flowers growing in Waliły, a village in Podlachia, which Tarasewicz made the centre of his universe. In actual fact, it is not important. The artist has never been occupied with showing places, but has thematised the human experience of colour in space. The imaging of colours, whose intensity and relationships with other colours enter the level of brightness, is among the riskiest challenges which an artist can explore in painting. At the same time, it is a risk worth taking; the experience of colour, touching euphoric chords, is at stake.