Wojciech Leder: 10+1

I first met Wojtek Leder more than twenty years ago. With the meticulousness already characteristic of him, he was cutting overlapping halftone screens into linoleum. Only in the prints did brutal pictorial invectives against symbols “generally acknowledged to be right” reveal themselves. Protest and politically engaged art seemed the obvious choice in that age, sickened by the impotence of all decency. It was then that Wojtek showed me his first painting. It was a sheet of paint torn from the wall of a bus, delaminated and supple as rubber, bearing the livid tattoo of a stencilled print. It lay over a black-and-white photograph — noticed only later, as though all this rendered it less important — on the brittle, glossy surface of its emulsion, cracked in one corner. I also remember Wojtek’s discomfiture at the energy of an artefact that had probably come into being somewhat inadvertently. After that event came only the great totem-like objects and a continual ascent.

Every subsequent painting by Leder reinforces my conviction that this is precisely what the outcome of painterly operations ought to be. That there are no compelling reasons to place representation in any context other than a painterly one. It is the integral reality of the rectangle, with its proper laws of borders and territory: a plane called into being to beguile the receptors of our mind. Even an idea that has only just been conceived is already entangled in the rigours of the frame and the discipline of space. The manner in which a painting is displayed, as well as its format and capacity for repetition, binds it to the kind of space architecture has taught us to understand. Although painting is four times older, the picture is plainly assigned to the architectural interior. Bringing paintings together in an exhibition allows us to experience this singular space. This, indeed, is how I remember Leder’s first exhibition: open cycles of repeated questions, divided time measured out in steps, the infinity of a mantra’s repetitions. Some cycles consist of only three paintings. The tripled quadrilateral multiplies the sign of matter awaiting good news. The appearance of the figure three expresses its fulfilment. This anticipated and self-evident encounter becomes the beginning of dizzying sequences of extraordinary numbers. Their progression is inscribed in the painting’s order, in the number of painterly layers and the structure of the composition. They are triptychs, although they do not belong to the order of mirror symmetry and do not possess the qualities of a closed set. They have been arrested as if in the biblical reckoning: “There are three things too wonderful for me, four that I do not understand.”

The eminent philosopher and logician Kazimierz Twardowski warned that using the term image in place of what he considered the more appropriate word painting reinforces a misconception in the viewer: the belief that the essence of a painterly message can be experienced solely by understanding the semantic relation between signifier and signified — the image in relation to what it represents. Yet in Leder’s case, the word painting does not seem entirely apt either. It evokes a procedure in which an intention is realised through addition: successive brushstrokes, glazes and textures, until the result is accepted. A painting is finished when the painter ceases to act. Leder’s process and technique bring an alchemist’s workshop more readily to mind. Here, above all, the time required for the processes imposed on matter must run its course: time for ash to return to the structure of stone and dust to recover its colour. Only then, often with specially made tools and after many weeks of laborious work, is the image extracted from the hardened lava. When the dust has settled and the smoke and toxic fumes have evaporated, the moment of revelation arrives.

I recently visited Wojtek in his studio. The painting I had hoped to glimpse was still hidden inside a rough, hard and dirty crust. Only small exposed patches disclosed its rocky surface. I remember these “stone paintings” as particularly beautiful: slabs as light as pink marble; “the philosopher’s wardrobe door”, bearing signs legible in reflections of light; or a floor with the shadow of a geometric discovery traced in it with a stick. Another bears a maxim about a lizard and resurrection copied from a patrician’s garden. These are the only paintings in the collection whose titles direct us towards another, historical reality. All I know about the new painting is that it will be larger than the previous ones and that this scale will be an especially significant element of its form. When the work is finally set upright and can be approached, it will probably be its dimensions that cause the sharpness of its edges to blur in peripheral vision and the quadrilateral to disappear. The impression that the image is “dissolving” will most likely be aided by aerial perspective and perhaps other painterly devices. In the end, Leder will stand face to face with the wall he has imagined — the surface whose appearance he has long awaited and to which he has even given a name. And if he decides “that it is good”, that this is how it was meant to happen, he will proceed to the final magical operations. With the procedures of his craft he will order the territory he has brought into being. Then, no longer dependent on its maker’s will, the painting can be shown.