Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. If you’ve never heard of Leon Tarasewicz, it’s because you live in an art world as narrow as the color sample in a cheap hardware store. I’m talking about this Polish painter of Belarusian origin, this artist who, for several decades, has stubbornly refused to fit into the boxes that the art market persistently offers him.
Tarasewicz is that discreet genius who settled in his native village of Waliły, near Białystok, on the Belarusian border, as if to snub the European art capitals that court artists like predators. He raises rare-breed chickens while his canvases travel to the world’s greatest museums. This contradiction is not a picturesque detail; it is the key to understanding the very essence of his art.
What strikes first about Tarasewicz is this radicality in his approach to color. His paintings explode with vivid hues that seem to pulse as if endowed with a life of their own. Red, yellow, blue, green, not the subtle and pretentious shades of trendsetters, no. Primary colors, fundamental, direct like a punch in the stomach of academism.
His technique is obsessive. These parallel lines, these repetitive patterns that might seem monotonous under other brushes, become in his hands abstract landscapes of vertiginous power. When he paints plowed fields, tree trunks, or birds in flight, he does not seek to represent them in the traditional sense, but to capture their rhythmic essence, their perpetual motion.
Tarasewicz’s art is deeply rooted in the observation of nature, but it transcends mere representation. He absorbs the landscape of his native region, digests it, and then spits it out in the form of colored structures that defy all narration. “I often notice incredible color patterns in nature,” he confides. “I would like to combine blue and green in a way that would give that almost luminous effect” [1]. This quest for luminosity, for chromatic intensity, is at the heart of his approach.
But Tarasewicz is not an ordinary easel painter. He quickly understood the limits of the traditional frame. From the mid-1980s, his paintings began to overflow, to invade the space. “My dream would be for the paintings to take absolute control over the viewer, making their environment disappear,” he writes. “My painting, freed from any framing, could then extend, unconstrained, attracting the viewer into it” [2].
This desire for total immersion led him to create monumental installations where the viewer no longer contemplates the painting but literally enters it. At the Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, at the Venice Biennale in 2001, or in public spaces like the Plaza Real in Barcelona, Tarasewicz transforms entire rooms into pictorial environments. The floor, the walls, the pillars, everything becomes a support for his expansive vision of painting.
In 2006, when he covers the monumental staircase of the Zachęta National Art Gallery in Warsaw with multicolored splashes, it is not a mere provocative gesture. He forces the viewer to walk on his painting, to become physically part of the work. The boundary between the observer and the observed collapses, as does the one between the represented nature and the artifice of the representation.
What makes Tarasewicz so important in the contemporary art landscape is his unwavering faith in the power of painting at a time when this medium has been declared dead many times over. “Painting has been and remains a decisive test of the state of society,” he affirms with steadfast conviction. “If painting were to perish, all civilization would very quickly go into decline” [3]. This statement may seem grandiloquent, but it reveals an essential truth about Tarasewicz’s vision: for him, painting is not just an artistic medium; it is a form of cultural resistance.
His singular position in the history of Polish art deserves attention. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in Tadeusz Dominik’s studio in the early 1980s, he emerged at a time when Poland was shaken by political and social upheavals. While many artists of his generation turned to a new expression imbued with direct political commentary, Tarasewicz chose a different, more subtle but no less subversive path.
His claim to his Belarusian roots and his commitment to the culture of this minority in Poland are not footnotes in his biography. They deeply inform his artistic practice, which can be read as a meditation on borders, identity, and belonging. In 1999, he refused the Art Prize of the President of Białystok in protest against the policies of the local authorities, which, according to him, fueled the conflict between the Polish and Belarusian communities. His art thus becomes a space for identity negotiation, where the clear lines that divide territories on political maps dissolve into fluid fields of color.
The heritage of Orthodox art, with its chromatic richness and spirituality linked to light, constitutes a major influence for Tarasewicz. As a child, he was deeply marked by the polychromes of Jerzy Nowosielski and Adam Stalony-Dobrzański in the Orthodox church of Gródek. This affiliation with Nowosielski, himself a giant of Polish painting who navigated between abstraction and sacred iconography, offers an important key to understanding the almost ritual dimension of Tarasewicz’s work.
But beyond these specific cultural references, his work dialogues with the great currents of Western art history. We perceive echoes of post-impressionism in his emotional treatment of color, resonances with American abstract expressionism in his conception of painting as a field of action, and an affinity with Polish Unism in his search for an organically unified pictorial surface.
What distinguishes Tarasewicz is his ability to synthesize these diverse influences into an immediately recognizable visual language. His regular bands of color have become his signature, as has his way of treating space as a natural extension of the canvas. This formal coherence is not the fruit of an easy formula but of a rigorous and continuous investigation of the possibilities of painting.
Literature and painting have had complex relationships for centuries, but in Tarasewicz, this relationship takes a particular, almost paradoxical turn. His categorical rejection of narration, his very refusal to title his works, can be interpreted as a literary position in the negative. He creates an art that resists verbal translation, that deliberately escapes the trap of words. As the art critic writes about his work: “The work of Leon Tarasewicz defies description and analysis. Words and language are inadequate in the face of the strange world of painting whose subject is painting, a painting devoid of narration but not detached from reality” [4].
This mistrust of verbal language recalls the position of certain modernist poets who sought to free words from their referential function to explore their pure materiality. Tarasewicz does something similar with color and form, freeing them from their descriptive role to let them exist as autonomous entities. There is a poetics of silence, an eloquent refusal of the anecdote that resonates with the tradition of concrete or visual poetry.
The relationship between architecture and painting constitutes another fundamental axis in Tarasewicz’s work. His monumental interventions transcend the traditional distinction between these two disciplines. When he paints directly on the walls of a gallery, covering the space from floor to ceiling, or when he creates labyrinthine paths like the one at the Artists’ Square in Kielce in 2011, he adopts an almost architectural approach to color.
His 2003 installation at the Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, where he built a complex structure covering most of the exhibition space, composed of imitations of walls, corridors, and bridges covered in colored cement, perfectly illustrates this fusion of disciplines. Architecture becomes a support for painting, and painting restructures the architectural experience. The viewer no longer passively looks at a painting hanging on the wall but physically navigates a spatial composition where color defines and transforms the space.
This architectural dimension of his work is particularly evident in his project “Art For a Place: Modry” for the Silesian Museum in Katowice in 2015, a tower of several tonalities made of wood that occupies the entire hall of the building and refers to a mining headframe. Here, Tarasewicz directly dialogues with the industrial history of the region, creating an abstract monument that evokes collective memory without falling into literal illustration.
Tarasewicz’s stance towards art history is both respectful and iconoclastic. He acknowledges his debt to the old masters and movements such as Polish Colorism and Unism but refuses to be confined to a fixed tradition. His practice is anchored in a deep conviction: “I believe that art always reflects a place and a time. It is inherent in the creative process, although an artist is not always aware of this relationship. There is nothing in my paintings that does not refer to reality” [5].
This statement may seem paradoxical coming from an artist whose works are often perceived as abstract, but it reveals the profoundly phenomenological nature of his approach. For Tarasewicz, abstraction is not an escape from reality but an attempt to grasp its underlying structures, its essential rhythms, its fundamental light.
The latest developments in his work confirm this ongoing quest for new forms of pictorial expression. His luminous boxes made of Plexiglas, exhibited at the Ego Gallery in Poznań in 2016, represent a new exploration of the relationship between color and light. These luminous pictorial objects, whose perception depends on multiple factors (time of day, viewer position, individual visual capacities), push even further his reflection on the nature of visual perception. As the gallery describes: “The more we look at these works and reflect on them, the more we notice things about their subject, and their plastic surface melts before our eyes, revealing successive layers and reflections” [6].
His exhibition “Jerozolima” (Jerusalem) at the Foksal Gallery in 2018, inspired by his visit to the eponymous city, also marks a significant evolution. The gallery space was filled with a composition created from intense yellow lights. Yellow, a rare color in the history of Polish painting, acquires a metaphorical significance here: “Yellow and its various shades are the colors of light. In Christianity, God is the light that penetrates the soul. Jerusalem is a holy city for three monotheistic religions” [7]. This installation raises profound questions about the nature of faith, divine unity, and religious divisions, showing how color can become a vehicle for theological and philosophical reflection.
When considering Tarasewicz’s entire body of work, what strikes is his categorical refusal of complacency. He could have easily capitalized on a recognizable aesthetic formula, producing endless variations of his colored band compositions to satisfy an eager market. Instead, he has constantly pushed the boundaries of his practice, questioning not only the conventions of painting but also those of the relationship between the work, the space, and the viewer.
A professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw since 1996, he transmits to new generations this ethic of rigorous experimentation. His influence on the Polish art scene is considerable, not only through his own work but also through his role as a mentor and defender of a demanding conception of art.
The numerous distinctions he has received, the Polityka Passport Award (2000), the Jan Cybis Award (2000), the Gloria Artis Silver Medal for Merit to Culture (2005), the Knight’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (2011), the honorary doctorate from the University of Białystok (2022), attest to the institutional recognition of his importance. But what truly matters is the impact of his art on those who experience it directly.
For Tarasewicz’s art is above all an experience. Not an anecdotal experience of the type “I saw a Tarasewicz exhibition,” but a physical, sensual, almost carnal encounter with color as a living substance. When he covers the floor of the Holy Trinity Chapel in Lublin with multicolored squares, it is not simply an aesthetic intervention but a radical transformation of our relationship to sacred space.
Tarasewicz reminds us that painting is not “just a brush and paint. It is a colored element with which we create illusions. It was so in the past, and it is so today” [8]. This conception of painting as a millennial illusionistic practice that transcends fashions and movements is deeply rooted in his artistic vision.
What makes Leon Tarasewicz such an important figure in contemporary art is his ability to maintain a radically coherent pictorial practice in an art world obsessed with superficial novelty. He proves that true innovation does not consist of jumping from one medium to another according to trends but of tirelessly exploring the possibilities of a personal visual language.
In a cultural landscape increasingly dominated by the ephemeral and the spectacular, Tarasewicz defends a conception of art as a long-term engagement with matter, space, and perception. His vibrant fields of color continue to pulse with an intensity that defies time, reminding us that painting, far from being a relic of the past, can still be the site of transformative aesthetic experiences.
So, the next time you come across a work by Tarasewicz, do not be content to look at it distractedly before moving on to the next one. Take the time to immerse yourself completely, to let the color invade your field of vision and to feel the rhythm of its patterns resonate within you.
- Culture.pl, “Leon Tarasewicz”, artist profile
- InGart.pl, “Leon Tarasewicz”
- Culture.pl, Op. cit.
- Labiennale.art.pl, “To Paint”, 2001, exhibition curator: Aneta Prasał-Wiśniewska.
- Culture.pl, Op. cit.
- Culture.pl, Op. cit.
- Culture.pl, Op. cit.
- Culture.pl, Op. cit.
