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In our culture, images are traditionally wrapped in words. Wojciech Leder’s paintings need no words. They are so autonomous, hermetic and alienated from the rest of the world that combining them with text seems superfluous. Every now and then, someone succeeds in finding a verbal equivalent for a painting. In the case of Leder’s painting, that moment has already occurred, and it is difficult to hope that it will be repeated soon. Everything that needed to be written is contained in Tomasz Załuski’s text.

Writing about these works is a challenge to the classical skill of ekphrasis—the translation of an image into words. It is a translational challenge that Przybora might have met, Barańczak probably would have, and Białoszewski and Father Baka certainly would have: they could have rendered all these lines, glazes, mirrorings, dots, smoke stains and craquelures into Polish as hyperbatons, hyperboles and even hyperoches, summoning a rhetorical fauna from oblivion. Even that might have proved insufficient to make the text sit well on the paintings. To pin down the painter’s invented methods of colouring surfaces, one would have to reach for such oddities as odwódki or lepieje. Ultimately, the entire thing would have to be turned so thoroughly that its revolutions would make many a Pegasus rear, never mind the reader². Such a translation would almost certainly be infiltrated by the false note of a light joke³, which is absent from the original, for many things can be said about these paintings, but probably not that they are humorous. Passing quick judgement, one might say that these paintings are more serious than buffo⁴, more subject to method than spontaneous⁵.

Here and there one sees seemingly accidental blooms and fissures, but only the artist knows how many tricks, concealed incisions and overpaintings lie behind them.

It is sensible to judge these paintings quickly, without reflection: the longer we look at them, the more they enchant our memory. Their perfection perhaps consists in the fact that, like mirrors, they imperceptibly entangle our vision with illusion and memory⁶. We examine them ever more closely and, as in every mirror, see with increasing clarity what we expected⁷. We recognise, notice and associate more and more, except that we are not looking at a mirror, but at a painting—only at what is reflected in it’⁸.

Leder’s paintings are indifferent. Almost as perfectly indifferent as the surface of a mirror—I suspect that even their pH is neutral⁹. They are indifferent to words, to erudite associations and philosophical theorems reflected so perfectly on their surface¹⁰.

Imitating the precision with which the painter constructs his works, this must be expressed differently once again. The paintings, most often with open compositions extending beyond the plane of the canvas, are capable of subordinating the associations around them to that composition. All these compass-drawn lines and painstakingly prepared cracks run somewhere beyond the painting and gradually impress their pattern on what we think about them.

In fulfilling the basic duty of a catalogue text, which should somehow trim to size, make accessible and tame what is singular, intuitive and incomprehensible, and what we readily call art, let us return—out of concern for those who do not read the notes—once again to the central question: what are Wojciech Leder’s paintings like? Abstract or representational, and if representational, what do they represent? Ornamental or decorative, or both at once? Beginning with the easier questions, let us turn to a quotation from Wiesław Juszczak: ‘ornament is a more serious word than decoration. Remaining within the sphere of linguistic intuitions rather than definitions, one may observe that decoration is essentially something added to an object. Ornament is integrally connected with the object it “adorns”. The Latin ornare means to adorn, embellish or equip. Decorare also means to adorn and embellish, but in addition to glorify and honour. (…) We remain within the same sphere, except that decoratio amounts to beautification, which is no longer associated with the word ornamentum (…) ornament, like art in general, cannot be confined either to the sphere of “symbolising” or within the bounds of “mimesis”. Nor can it be reduced to any “abstraction”’¹¹. If we agree that what we see on the surface of Leder’s paintings is precisely ornament, and if we believe the final sentence of the quotation above, we can pass over the category that explains nothing—abstraction—and finally set off against the current of time: ‘it is true that, in the forms in which it functions today, ornament may be deprived both of meanings and of every reference to reality. Its “realist” meaning—and at the same time its cognitive function in the artistic sense—dies wherever art descends to the margins of a culture and life oriented towards practicality and technology. Ornament constitutes the domain of art that belongs directly to “archaic ontology”, to use Eliade’s phrase: an ontology that discerns in all manifestations of nature and life, including human nature and life, direct or indirect, almost reflexive signs of hierophany. The emergence of ornament and its development alongside other forms of art are rooted in a religious image of the world. This development, and also the persistence of ornament, is possible only insofar as, and only for as long as, the order endures in which the “sense of order” is coupled with the “sense of mystery”. The “sense of decorativeness” has its source in this coupling. This sense is inextricably connected with every form of art, for it records what I would call an eschatological vision of reality. It neither avoids nor abstracts from what is sensuously visible, but it always reveals its limits. Ornament seems to be a “means”—if that is the appropriate word—peculiarly sensitive to acknowledging and perceiving this furthest boundary’¹². Leder’s painting appears ‘peculiarly sensitive’ to this archaic coupling of the ‘sense of order and sense of mystery’ that acts so powerfully upon us today. Through its dense weave, ornament restores to us the—perhaps illusory—memory of a lost unity of ‘nature and life, including human nature and life’.

The largest painting at Atlas Sztuki, the only one singled out in the exhibition title 10 + 1 —almost half a tonne of ash and aggregate mixed with pigments¹³, bonded and ground within a frame measuring 2.5 × 4.5 metres—was entitled Ordinare agrum by the artist. The compositional skeleton of Ordering the Earth was a perspectivally foreshortened grid whose nodes define arcs later filled with patches contrasting in value and tone. The only visible order in this stone sfumato worked with grinding discs is the order of aerial perspective receding towards the upper edge. Almost four months of collective labour—collective because the scale and technique imposed on Leder the role of architect and production manager overseeing craftsmen¹⁵. The simplest possible device for introducing order, organising the painting through perspective, was coupled with a juggling of the elements. Aerial perspective in rock, stone reluctantly revealing the structure of air¹⁶, the ‘sense of mystery’ ground down so that the ‘sense of order’ might loom in perspective. Mixing is supposedly dangerous in itself; mixing elements, orders and things is a highly risky game.

Nothing remains for us but to climb after the artist into the depths of the painting, hoping that his chosen method of revealing successive layers and fragments will ultimately lead us to a view of the Whole spread out before us, so breathtaking that it takes one’s breath away in stone. The risk is considerable, because little separates the capitalised Whole from the Chasm, and, unfortunately, Wholes most often reveal themselves in material as dense as stone—in poetry. Mixing poetry into a catalogue text can affect the text and its reader like any other kind of mixing.

Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum: Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still
Durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will, ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum¹⁷.

If we have made it through this fragment of Rilke’s poem, we may be close to the deepest fissure in the surface of Leder’s paintings. It leads through the interweaving of ‘nature and life, including human nature and life’ so far that we can almost discern what the poet’s language called Dinge an sich—things in themselves¹⁸. Unfortunately, as we squeeze towards things in themselves, we find ourselves in a place so narrow that there is no longer any room for latitude. In these realms far removed from us, art serves the cognition of truth, although it may be a truth that is no longer entirely comprehensible or human. Mieczysław Jastrun writes of Rilke’s gradual movement away from what is human, the mixing of subjects and the overlapping of successive layers of things until they fuse and permeate one another. The concept of the thing, so important to Rilke’s work in the first decade of the twentieth century, was explained by the poet in his study of Rodin. Poetry, usually leading the hunt for truth about the world, here attempts to describe truth by intently observing the process by which something that is a work of art comes into being. Yet, as Rilke wrote, this is not about shaping a beautiful thing. ‘No. Who could know what beauty is?’¹⁹. In a thing, one can recognise only what one has loved, what has frightened and moved us. In Rilke’s view, no one has created ‘beauty’. The thing that emerges from human hands is like Socrates’s Eros, a daemon between God and man; ‘it is not beautiful itself, but is love itself, a longing for beauty’²⁰. Every now and then, we happen to perceive an object—a thing in itself. ‘One day,’ Rilke wrote, ‘its insistence, its singularity, the almost desperate seriousness proper to all objects attracted your attention; and did you not then notice how this object, almost against its will, was encompassed by a beauty whose possibility you would never have suspected? If such a moment ever existed, I wish to invoke it now. For this is the moment from which objects re-enter your life. None of them has access to you unless you allow it to surprise you with a beauty that could not have been expected’²¹. Leder’s paintings can grant us the same kind of moment; it is enough to let our gaze wander for a while. We have a chance to rediscover that flash-brief form of intelligent looking with which we regard a thing seen for the first time—a thing at which we look as though we knew we were seeing it for the last time. To rediscover the gaze with which Rilke looked at things around 1906. The artist should not think about beauty. He can only know the circumstances and conditions under which beauty will appear in the things he creates. ‘Guided solely by the desire to achieve a usefulness that exceeds him, he knows only that certain conditions exist, and that once they have been taken into account, beauty may graciously consent to descend upon the thing he has made’²². Only a poet, and one writing a hundred years ago, could call things by their names with such insolence and lack of restraint. Today it is unseemly to expect beauty to descend, but, put most simply, therein lies the essence of some paintings in this exhibition. They attract our attention because a beauty not planned at the moment of creation has graciously ‘descended’ upon some of them, in its wildest form because it is spontaneous. A beauty not calculated according to any canon, yet so surprisingly harmonious with the most enduring—again partly Pythagorean—theory. Beauty arising from colour, brilliance and the proportions of parts. For a significant part of the contemporary art world, applying the label of a painter who makes ‘beautiful pictures’ sounds like a sentence, as does using the terms decorative and ornamental in an ontological rather than ironic sense. We are so afraid to apply these categories both to art and to our own lives that Leder may be included among artists who are ‘aesthetically incorrect’. According to Rilke, the artist’s vocation is to learn the conditions necessary to ‘evoke’ beauty and ‘acquire the ability to create them. (…) whoever carefully follows these conditions through to the end will understand that they do not extend beyond the surface and nowhere penetrate the interior of the object; that all one can do is create a surface enclosed in a particular manner and nowhere accidental, which, like the surface of natural objects, is surrounded, darkened and illuminated by the atmosphere of that surface alone—and nothing more. From among all the highly ambitious and capricious words, art suddenly appears transferred to the sphere of the inconspicuous and of sober, everyday matters—to craft. For what does it mean: to make a surface?’²³. Contrary to appearances, all this was written about Rodin’s works, not Leder’s paintings made almost a century later—paintings close to craft, in which we deal with surface alone. There is no hard evidence by which this rather surprising connection between Leder’s painting and Rilke’s view of Rodin’s sculptures could be demonstrated conclusively. There are only clues. For some time now, we have been in the realm of exact fantasy, and let us remain there a while longer. ‘Let us consider for a moment whether everything before us, everything we perceive, translate and explain to ourselves, is not surface? And everything we call spirit and soul and love: is it not merely a slight change on the small surface of a face close to us? (…) For all the happiness with which hearts have ever trembled, all the greatness whose thought almost destroys us, every one of those vast transforming ideas—all of this was, at some moment, merely a tightening of the lips, a raising of the eyebrows, shadows on foreheads: and that crease around the mouth, that line above the eyelids, that darkness upon a face may once have existed in exactly the same way: as a pattern on an animal’s fur, as a groove in rock, as a hollow in a fruit… There is only one single surface, moved and transformed in a thousand folds. With this thought one might encompass the whole world for a moment, yet it was simply placed into the hands of the person who thought it. For whether something can become life depends not on great ideas, but on whether one makes of them a craft, an everyday practice, something that will remain with a person until the end of their days’²⁴.

Wojciech Leder is astonishingly conservative, not so much in what he does as in what he says about his works: praise of beauty as something possible in art; attachment to universal values; and, above all, an exceedingly careful demarcation between the order of philosophical erudition—which he readily draws upon, sealing already completed paintings with a title—and cool intellectual speculation, and the order of creation, which remains mysterious even to him. Before his paintings, abandoned to intuition and chance, we are probably as close to things in themselves as in Rilke’s poetry. And it is this entirely genuine exoticism, honestly hit upon as though on safari, of something that comes from the very borderland of the human world that so categorically captures our attention. In 1930, Walther Rehm crowned a long tradition of reaching truth through objects with Rilke’s poetry, a tradition he called Dingmystik—the Mysticism of Things²⁵. In part, Rehm’s Mysticism of Things intersects with the tradition of exact fantasy (die exakte Phantasie) recalled by Rudolf Otto in 1949, which since Goethe had acquired significance as a ‘cognitive faculty’²⁶. ‘A faculty granted to authentic artists that allows their gaze to penetrate truth, that opens truth before their eyes. And not merely some human truth (nicht bloss eine menschliche Wahrheit), but the truth of being itself (die Wahrheit des Seins selbst)’²⁷, as Hölderlin wrote. Leder can probably be included among those participating both in the Mysticism of Things and in exact fantasy. The striking, though difficult to define, otherness of Leder’s painting also arises partly from what happened to things in twentieth-century art. Hans-Georg Gadamer called it ‘the destruction of the thing’. ‘The order that we can experience through modern art has, of course, nothing in common with the great model of the order of nature and the structure of worlds²⁸. Nor does it reflect the human experience expressed in the content of myths, or the world embodied in familiar and beloved manifestations of things. All this is already disappearing. We live in a modern industrial world. And this world has not only pushed the visible forms of ritual and cult to the margins of our existence; it has done still more—it has destroyed the thing’²⁹. Amid all the relational, shifting clamour in which we are embedded, we can turn to a thing—for example, to the thing Wojciech Leder called The Temptation of Saint Anthony³⁰. On the one hand, it is a perfect thing: rounded and swollen, imitating a screen in its proportions and brilliance. A model of a gadget, painted with ‘a coloured pigment that I dissolved in car lacquer. I wanted the materials (…) somehow to touch upon contemporary fetishes. (…) mica, the lipstick pigments with which women paint their lips, the glossy lacquer with which men paint fast cars—this is the essence of appearance’, the artist says³¹. Rather, the essence of temptation; from essence it is only a short step to existence, from object to subject. Faithful to inquisitive exact fantasy and penetrating Mysticism of Things, we must finally examine this thing—temptation—more closely. There must be some core within it, since the glitter-coated fibreboard is swollen by something. Inside is a peg³². A peg driven tightly into a box is nothing other than the soul. The image of the luthier-painter Wojciech Leder, whittling and hammering wooden pegs into fibreboard in his studio, lacquered with mica from Pollena-Ewa mixed with Toyota lacquer under the influence of an intuitive impulse, would be amusing enough for us finally to return to the maniera buffa with which we began so pleasantly³³. Were it not for the fragment from Walther Rehm’s Wirklichkeitsdemut und Dingmystik that sums up Rilke’s thing-poems: ‘der Dichter wohnt in der Mitte der Dinge und verwandelt sich in sie’³⁴, followed by something worse: ‘desto näher ist er am Tode, desto reifer am Tode. Völlige Dingerfüllung ist Todesreife’³⁵. The peg, the whittled soul, vibrates unpleasantly in medias res within the Temptation, and if this is the truth of being itself… Box, grave: only Father Józef Baka could continue writing, but he has long been inside.

1. Tomasz Załuski, Techniques of Infinite Ends, [in:] Wojciech Leder, Paintings, catalogue of the exhibition at the Castle Gallery in Lubin and Jatki Gallery in Nowy Targ, Lubin 2003, pp. 2–5.
2. Another, perhaps more elegant, method is to replace laborious translation with an incisive account. This, however, requires infernal erudition and clarity of mind in order to arrive immediately at a phrase that explains Leder’s entire painterly method, as Kant’s ‘Technik der Natur’ was juxtaposed by Tomasz Załuski with a quotation from Jean-Luc Nancy with surgical precision.

3. The tone of asteism, as Dr Kazimierz Piotrowski put it in the catalogue text for Zbigniew Libera’s exhibition at Atlas Sztuki in March 2004.
4. To spare readers unwilling to become entangled in details the trouble, it may be said here already that, above all, these are good paintings.

5. It is enough to imagine a garage in which Wojciech Leder and Jackson Pollock paint from opposite sides on a spread-out sheet—each in his own manner of drip painting—to appreciate the rigour to which these paintings are subjected.
6. Janina Ładnowska has already written that these paintings may be nothing other than mirrors: ‘Once, he hung them on ropes against a background of flowering chestnut trees, like washing. The paintings then became mirrors and acquired new meanings: while being imago, they reflected infinity almost physically.’ Quoted after J. Ładnowska, Wojciech Leder’s Stone Paintings, [in:] Wojciech Leder, Paintings, catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź, Łódź 2001, p. 9.

7. If the Minister of Culture issued a decree ordering mirrors in private homes to be replaced by Leder’s paintings, we would spend more time at our morning toilet.
8. Another feature the paintings share with mirrors is that they cannot be reproduced. No print and no slide can convey to a viewer all the qualities of the original.

9. Marcus Aurelius, as we know him from the opening lines of the Meditations, would fall in love with them at once, only to become sad again that he had broken his ideal of apatheia.

10. Who knows whether the best way to write about Leder’s painting is not to write about what is absent from his pictures, yet looms in the associations around them. Pythagoreanism and the icon might occupy some of the first entries in this long catalogue of themes. The temptation to write about Leder’s paintings as a revelation of the Pythagorean certainty that number is the principle of everything is all the greater because the artist himself encourages it, giving titles such as One Double Three among Four, An Attempt at Harmony, or arranging thousandfold layers of colour according to the distribution of prime numbers and geometric figures. Without effort, Leder can be transformed into a Neo-Pythagorean and then into a Kabbalist, from which it is only a short step to mysticism, gnosis and so forth. If number does in fact play some role in these paintings, it is once again because of Kant’s technique of nature. We need only cautiously repeat with Hugo Steinhaus that ‘mathematics mediates between spirit and matter’ in order to proceed to the many combinations in which Leder’s painting can be juxtaposed with the icon. The very essence of the image understood as eikon, which is nothing other than an outer shell or epidermis behind which extends the immaterial idea of eidos, resembles the mechanism by which Leder’s works release associations. In both cases, vision passes straight through towards something that cannot be seen, but only imagined. To return to the mirror metaphor—icons are, after all, mirrors, albeit a peculiar kind of one-way mirror. The gaze of those who have experienced illumination passes freely through, while the looks of everyone else become lodged in the rough surface of the painting. The aforementioned ‘seriousness’, the absence of anecdote, uniformity and the conviction of a connection between an image and value understood axiologically—all this facilitates slipping into a religious interpretation of these paintings, behind which successive hypostases of the ‘prototype established by nature’ undulate, to quote once again Załuski quoting Kant {note 1}. The particular manner, or rather painterly technique, that makes the paintings resemble creations of nature and subjects them to a significant degree of randomness and chance means that they can readily be described using the technical term underlying the icon. These paintings may be contemporary acheiropoietic images. ‘Axeiropoihtow, Αγίας Σοφίας, is the opposite of the term xeiropoihto frequently used by Herodotus—drawn, made by human hands—an opposite devised by Christians to describe belief in the existence of images impressed into matter supernaturally, by the power of divine emanation. Leder’s repeatedly expressed hope that his paintings “transmit energy (…) reach deeper. They express themselves at a very basic level”, and operate like “energy screens”’—quoted after Stone Becomes an Image. M. Ujma in conversation with W. Leder, [in:] Wojciech Leder, Paintings, catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź, Łódź 2001, p. 27—encourages us to look at them precisely as such. For balance, at least one entirely material approach should be set against these possible spiritual modes of interpretation. The simplest of all: why not see Leder as a late grandson of Strzemiński and his conviction that the homogeneity of the canvas surface must be emphasised? Let us interrupt any further enumeration with a quotation, again for balance, from an agnostic, albeit one underpinned by faith in the inseparable unity of everything that exists. Returning, then, to the statement that all this concerns not the paintings themselves but their interpretation, let us realise that we are looking at ‘myriads of volatile atoms that remain eternally silent, for atoms have no history at all; they are all equal, whether they come from the mightiest stars, from dead planets or from rational beings, good or evil, since matter is the same throughout the entire Cosmos…’—quoted after S. Lem, White Death, [in:] idem, Fables for Robots, Kraków 1964, p. 86. Leder’s paintings have no history either.

11. Wiesław Juszczak, Sinful Ornament, [in:] idem, Fragments: Essays on the Theory and Philosophy of Art, Warsaw 1995, p. 166.
12. Ibid., pp. 167–168.
13. This half-tonne of aggregate is a weighty argument confirming coincidence in art. Despite artists’ aversion to being paired or bundled together, it must be observed that Leon Tarasewicz—one of the few Polish artists whose work might be juxtaposed with Wojciech Leder’s—also abandoned the brush not long ago in favour of a concrete mixer, concrete and pigments.

14. This geometric coordinate grid imposed on the agrum—the earth—allows the painting to be placed within a long iconographic tradition extending back at least to the sixth century, in which, on the one hand, the earth was consistently represented as a conglomeration of formless, threatening, upthrust rocks—a sign of dark matter—and, on the other, by regular forms, most often in the guise of the urbs quadrata, a symbol of human activity, or culture, beginning with agri cultura. The juxtaposition of regular geometric figures with the irregular variability of nature closest to Leder’s composition can be seen in illuminations from the Corpus agrimensorum romanorum, a ninth-century copy of a treatise on land surveying (Biblioteca Vaticana, Pal. lat. 1564), where the illuminator superimposed a grid of regular rectangles painted in red lead upon undulating multicoloured hills and rocks.

15. For anyone writing a social history of art in the Third Polish Republic, this will be an example of the return to the idea of cooperation between ‘art and industry’, so popular during the ancien régime and developed from the mid-1960s onwards.
16. This mixing of the two elements, air and rock, positively invites a reference to the exegesis of a passage from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 10:4). Referring to a rabbinic legend whose traces have survived in the Book of Exodus (Exod. 17:6) and the Book of Numbers (Num. 20:11), according to which the Jews were accompanied during their wanderings in the desert by a rock from which Moses miraculously brought forth life-giving water, the Apostle writes: ‘(…) and drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them (…)’. This allegory of the fascinating ‘self-propelled’ rock has an enormous reach in the tradition of Christian allegoresis, which has to a significant extent determined the symbols that lay claim to universality in European culture. The surprising connection with Ordinare agrum arises from the Greek wording of this passage: pneymatikh. akoloyuoysh. petra.’. Pneumatikos petra—the spiritual rock. The term pneumatikos is one of the most ambiguous and, at the same time, fundamental terms in Saint Paul and the tradition derived from him, a tradition that separates the body from psyche and pneuma. Pneuma—a term drawn from Stoic philosophy—most often denotes the spiritual, spirit itself standing above the powers of the psyche and the material body. Pneumatikos can also mean a gust, wind, air, breath, exhalation or breathing. Petra literally means a rock, block of stone or boulder—the very materials of which the aggregate and ashes in the painting are composed—but in the allegorical sense it is a symbol of Christ (see pneyma pneymtiko, [in:] Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich, Stuttgart 1959, vol. 6, pp. 443–448; petra, [in:] Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, vol. 6, pp. 96–97). Paul himself, moreover, dispels any doubt by adding the sentence: ‘and that rock was Christ’ / h petra de hn o Xristo. By superimposing aerial perspective upon rock, Leder joined—or, in biblical terms, made—two elements that, according to 1 Corinthians 10:4, were nothing other than polimorfos Christos, the divine, life-giving element embodied in Jesus. Very early, and not only in the Christian but also in the Jewish tradition—for example, in Philo of Alexandria—petra would become synonymous with logos, the word or principle governing nature; Jesus is, of course, again the incarnation of the Logos; or with sophia, wisdom. Pneumatikos petra, an allegory commented upon, recalled and represented in hundreds, if not thousands, of places, expressing faith that Spirit permeates and directs matter, perfectly complements the painting’s classically Roman title, Ordinare agrum, for this Ordering is nothing other than the introduction of spiritual order into the world. It would be difficult to find a more emphatic example of why it is worth attentively following Wojciech Leder’s paintings as they arise under the influence of chance. Finally, knowing the perversities of the contemporary world, it should be cautiously mentioned that a painting which might be received as a religious apotheosis of construction aggregate in a gallery associated with Atlas Group may, in a Catholic country, attract suspicions of dangerous connections between religion and marketing; the question is: who is behind all this?

17. Fragment of the poem [Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen…] / [From every thing comes a call to fellow-feeling…]
(…) All beings are secretly traversed
By an inner world. Birds on silent wings

Fly straight through us. O, I who
Would grow, look out, and the tree grows within me.
Quoted after Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems. Selected, translated into Polish and furnished with an afterword by Mieczysław Jastrun, Kraków 1987, pp. 336–337.
18. In the language of the poet and, of course, again Kant, since it was really from him that things in themselves came to be noticed—or rather invented. Earlier, they had appeared incidentally in Descartes and Malebranche as choses en elles memes, and in Locke (things in themselves). It would be interesting to trace how the philosophical tradition of things in themselves relates to the highly diverse ways of discovering and inventing new categories of things in twentieth-century art, beginning with ready-mades.
19. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, translated into Polish by Witold Wirpsza, Kraków 1963, p. 118.
20. Mieczysław Jastrun, Afterword, [in:] Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems, Kraków 1987, p. 401.
21. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, p. 119.
22. Ibid., p. 120.
23. Ibid., pp. 120–121.
24. Ibid., pp. 121–123. In fact, throughout whole multi-page passages of the second part, entitled Lecture and written after Rilke’s separation from Rodin in 1907, it would be enough to replace ‘Rodin’ with ‘Leder’ to obtain a review of the present exhibition by Rainer Maria Rilke. For example: ‘Just think how the person who wished to master every surface had to work, since no thing resembles another (…) what a task emerges here! And how simple and serious it is (…) how entirely devoid of empty phrases. Craft remains, but it appears to be a craft for someone immortal, so vast and immeasurable is it (…) To render the form of an object meant: to pass through every place, to leave nothing unsaid, omit nothing, deceive nowhere, to know all one hundred profiles, every lower and upper aspect, every cross-section. Only then did the object exist; only then did it become an island, separated on every side from the continent of uncertainty.’ Ibid., pp. 127–130.
25. W. Rehm, Wirklichkeitsdemut und Dingmystik, ‘Logos. Inernationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur’ 19 (1930), pp. 297–358. Among the representatives of this current of contemplative looking at reality, one can point to figures amusingly close to Wojciech Leder, such as Spinoza, with his scientia intuitiva, later so adored by Goethe and a precursor of exact fantasy. Spinoza concerned himself with philosophy, although in everyday life—like Leder—he practised grinding. See W. Rehm, op. cit., pp. 299–300.
26. This is a form of cognition opposed to the image of reality established in European culture by science based on natural knowledge and the power of ‘calculating and measuring’ reason, which lays claim to being the ‘only correct path’.
27. Quoted after Wiesław Juszczak, The Reality of the Gods, Kraków 2002, p. 81.
28. Unless we try Leder’s ., which undoubtedly has much in common both with the order of nature and with the construction of worlds, in its cracks and in its delicately incised ellipses.
29. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason, Word, History, Warsaw 1979, p. 139. Gadamer is among the resolute critics of the dominance of ‘calculating and measuring’ reason, opposing the overweening natural sciences with the traditions of the humanities, based on a conviction familiar to anyone writing about paintings: that there are propositions which cannot be proved directly, ‘because they are reached through prolonged engagement with the object’. See A. Bronk, The Project of a Hermeneutic Philosophy of the Humanities, ‘Studia metafizyczne’, 1993, vol. I, p. 289.
30. If we believe Louis Réau, Ordinare agrum and The Temptation of Saint Anthony share a common strand. Réau writes rather enigmatically that, in the fifteenth century, images of the temptation of Saint Anthony—divided into temptation on earth and the saint’s abduction into the air by demons—served as a pretext for representing the then-fashionable doctrine of the four elements (see L. Réau, Iconographie de l’art. chretien, Paris 1958, vol. III, part 1, p. 107). Believing Réau is rather risky; in the same entry, he supplies the Polish name les tentation de saint Antoine – Kuszenie św. Antoniego.
31. Stone Becomes an Image. M. Ujma in conversation with W. Leder, [in:] Wojciech Leder, Paintings, catalogue of the exhibition at the Museum of Art in Łódź, Łódź 2001, p. 21.

32. This is probably the first peg in Leder’s paintings. In 1996, he had already painted one Temptation of Saint Anthony, but at the time the painting’s surface was almost as flat as a screen.
33. Besides, since these paintings are in fact indifferent to words, let us offer a happy ending for those who do not care for sad conclusions: ‘There once lived a great constructor and inventor who ceaselessly devised extraordinary devices and created the strangest images. (…) He bore a bold heart as his seal, and every atom that left his hand carried that sign, so that scholars later marvelled to find flickering little hearts in atomic spectra. He built many useful images, great and small, until a bizarre idea came to him: to unite death and life, and thus accomplish the impossible.’ Quoted almost after Stanisław Lem, The Three Electroknights, [in:] idem, Fables for Robots, Kraków 1964, p. 7.

34. The poet lives at the centre of things and transforms himself into them (translated into Polish by K.C.), W. Rehm, Wirklichkeitsdemut und Dingmystik, p. 341,
35. The closer he is to death, the riper for death. Complete fulfilment in the thing is readiness for death (translated into Polish by K.C.), ibid., p. 345. Der Mitte der Dinge—the centre of things that has grown so extensively in Leder’s painting—is perhaps, in view of Hans Sedlmayr’s famous Verlust der Mitte, the diagnosis that contemporary art has lost its coherence, the only means available to art, since: ‘Art is—in every sense of the word—eccentric.’ See H. Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, Salzburg 1948, p. 150. The fact that the core of this centre of things lies in our death has already been revealed many times in art.