untitled, 1987

Leon Tarasewicz leaves the viewer with only the painting and its painterly, symbolic and iconic layers. The designation “untitled” which often adorns his works at exhibitions is deliberate and plays the role of a suggestion informing us about the absence of a commentary from the artist.

It is difficult to write about a single one of the artist’s paintings because what seems to be the essence of his output is revealed through the process of his work on the conceptual aspect of painting. Generally speaking, Tarasewicz’s explorations can be described as a transition from a fascination with nature and attempts to translate experiences with nature into artistic qualities to a focus on painting in and of itself, which has become the sole object of the artist’s pursuits. He has moved away from representation and rejected iconic aspects in his works while the plane on which his work is recorded has become, aside from the traditional canvases and boards, the space itself (e.g. the interior of a gallery).

The artist’s early works from the 1980s, including the painting from Kolekcja II, oscillate between a search for an individual landscape formula and an aim to deepen the purely painterly quality of the works – the colours, light and texture of the paint. Landscape, which at that point in Tarasewicz’s career can be considered his field of interest, eludes simple classification. The recognition of forms from nature is automatically augmented with a rhythmic division that forms a clear composition, consequently deceiving the eye and suspending the subject somewhere between an image of a landscape and a sense of a pulsating painterly fabric. Nature has been transformed into a language of simple forms being a peculiar reflection of tree trunks and forest undergrowth filtered through a painterly perception of reality. Often emphasised is the symbolic dimension of these simple and pure characters that comprise an almost archetypical pattern for an image of nature. But it is impossible to resist the impression that the attempt to deepen the essence of painting, the diligent examination of colour and light and shadow that has characterised Tarasewicz’s work from the beginning, is a condition of a sine qua non sublimation of nature, as noticed in his earlier works.

Izabela Kopania