Leon as a tour guide
on May 14, 2007
in local
Leon Tarasewicz has brought part of his international pack of friends to the region again. They are touring all those semi-hidden places in search of links between the past and present, so abruptly and painfully broken here around mid-twentieth century. Last Saturday evening at Willa Sokrates in Krynki, Polish was the least spoken language when the host and three of his visitors read in turn Janowicz’s ‘Miniatures’ in Belorusian, Italian and English.
The group’s densely packed week culminates with Leon’s new exhibition at Arsenal Gallery on Friday afternoon. This inevitably takes us back to May 1995, when a curator of his previous exhibition asked if we could give them a hand preparing it over a weekend. We hapilly agreed of course, not knowing yet what we were letting ourselves in for. When we entered the gallery’s first-floor rooms, we saw stark white walls randomly covered with splashes of primary colours. Then the artist gave us a supersonic course in the painting technique he adopted for his exhibition, and off we started. That weekend we covered hundreds square metres of walls, floor to ceiling, one room in dabs of sky-blue and daffodil-yellow, some other room in blood-red and grass-green, yet another one in horizintal stripes of all sunset colours. Soon, with our aching arms, we learned about some artists’ toil – Leon certainly is one of them. We also learned about the hallucinogenic effect of painting – vivid colours danced in front of us, even with the eyelids closed, for days on. And that’s how we met Leon.
Arsenal Gallery, 1995
