Radomír Leszczynski: Circles, Curves, Structures, Cells, Works

2 – 29 Mar 2015

The exhibition takes place at the Art Archive as part of the Polička/Shelf project.

Opening Monday, 2.3.2015 17:00

If we look at a landscape from only a human perspective – thus through eyes usually located somewhere under two metres from the surface of the earth, and if we stand within our field of vision, it can be difficult to realize the three-dimensional nature of landscape, its vertical dimension.

Often it is only when we rise up and trees change into a forest, people and houses into a city, and rain showers into a weather front, we remind ourselves that a landscape consists of many sequential, commingling, and above all interacting layers. We have a similar experience when we for example peer into our own body with a microscope, and it is not surprising that living systems share a number of characteristics, from the level of individual cells to that of a landscape.

Radomír Leszczynski pictures neither cells nor tissues, or landscape from a bird’s-eye view, but when viewing his paintings and prints, it is useful to apply the same principles as when viewing these structures – above all a view from above, an awareness of the presence of variously sized basic elements, and an awareness of history – the assembly of layers one by one, where individual levels are not without their own further evolution.

The basic elements of Leszczynski’s prints are reminiscent of the aforementioned organic units – organelles, cells, fibres; this similarity is not a chance one (he really was originally inspired by looking into a microscope), but is not determinative. Aside from round organic shapes and curves, he also works with straight stripes and polygons, fragments of higher geometric structures, or points arranged regularly in a grid, in short with abstract, and thus general shapes that can refer to all sorts of things; however, the main thing for the picture, thus for the system, is their interaction.

The colour, shape, size, and number of basic elements in one layer are characteristics that naturally affect each other; but the fact that we perceive Leszczynski’s prints as a whole with depth and dynamism is above all thanks to interaction between entire layers. Each component simultaneously makes up the whole, reacts to its surroundings, and transforms them, as well as itself.

A computer, the ideal “brush” for Leszczynski’s complex way of thinking and working, expands on the natural multiplicity of starting points. Aside from the ability to immediately print the work out, evaluate it, and go forward, it significantly liberates the physical process of creation itself, above all making it possible to complete one situation with various, even contradictory ways, as we can see in series included in his author’s books.

The pictures we encounter may be partial solutions, but they are ordered systems. Their components react to each other in an orderly fashion, similarly as is the case in living system. Leszczynski’s layered prints are not images of concrete realities, but they do illustrate a principle, and in this one can see the grandness of human activity – creation of a system with generally applicable principles.

Curator: Lucie Rohanová