The Metaphysics of the Sign | Andrzej Leśnik
4.09.2026 – 30.09.2026
Gallery Platan, Polish Institute Budapest
Recalling Andrzej Leśnik’s thesis defence in 1984, Jerzy Ludwiński writes that, of all the diploma works he had encountered, Leśnik’s was the least visually striking. His gaze might not even have lingered on it had he not noticed something unusual: the artist layered his zigzags one over another and then partially scraped them away. “It seemed to me as though this young artist had gone into reverse. As though he were trying to reach a point where his vast knowledge of contemporary art was somehow melting away in those zigzags.”
Ludwiński, however, did not see this dissolution as a loss of knowledge. Quite the opposite: he saw it as a return to something elemental and primordial, all the way back to the beginnings of art itself. To the moment when a line did not yet represent or explain anything, but was simply the trace of someone who had been there, touched a surface and left a mark behind.
Perhaps this is what moves me most about Leśnik’s art: the paintings gathered here make clear that abstraction, in his work, is neither cold, nor calculated nor is it an attempt to drain reality of its substance. These paintings are “soft” and “hot”, because they preserve a kind of primordial, visceral presence. The movement of the hand, the painter’s energies and emotions are embedded in the lines. Far from concealing the person who made them, Leśnik’s geometric forms make that person visible.
For more than four decades, Leśnik has been putting the same fundamental element to continual investigation. Ludwiński may speak of zigzags, but the term can be misleadingly reductive, since the motif emerged from an expressive transformation of the triangle and the V-shape. Leśnik condenses and breaks apart this elemental form, layers and frames it, makes it almost invisible or saturates it with colour. In his work, it is not simply a device of modern geometric abstraction, but a sign that appears at once primordial and contemporary.
The history of Polish abstraction is often narrated through two major traditions. Emotional, gestural abstraction on the one hand, and geometric-constructivist art on the other. What makes Andrzej Leśnik’s painting so distinctive is that this division impossible to sustain in the presence of his works. He does not occupy a position halfway between the two. Rather he brings these different modes of painterly through together within a single image. His paintings are so compelling precisely because they belong comfortably to neither geometric abstraction nor gestural painting. Here, regularity does not suppress expressivity; instead, it creates a framework within which every deviation, hesitation and emphatic brushmark becomes perceptible.
This is particularly striking given the distinctive context of Poznań in which Lesnik’s art developed. Poznan is generally described as a place of intellectual discipline , associated with a mode of thinking resistant to facile emotionalism. Yet it was the energy of the New Expression that emerged in the 1980s that had the greatest impact on Lesnik, while it was only in the following decades that he turned increasingly towards geometric abstraction. The gesture, however, did not disappear. It migrated into the geometric system. Leśnik never adopted the impersonal precision of the geometric tradition. Each time, the system is permeated by the materiality of paint, the irregularity of the hand and the singular, unrepeatable character of its execution. What emerges is not the denial of the gesture, but its containment: an energy held within a structure, always belonging to the particular moment in which the painting is made.
Viewed from the perspective of Hungarian art, István Nádler perhaps offers the closest parallel. In Nádler’s work, too, geometric structure is combined with the intensity of movement. Yet while Nádler’s gestures are often sweeping, calligraphic and free-flowing, Leśnik contains movement within a recurring module and a process of ritual repetition.
The Mamantra cycle is perhaps the clearest example of this process. Leśnik begins by using a stencil to draw a structure composed of five rows, then proceeds to multiply, shift and complicate the pattern freehand. Painting thus becomes a regulated and repetitive action, almost ritualistic in character, yet its purpose is not to produce identical results. The creative process becomes like a mantra: repetition serves as a means of concentration that does not erase differences, but makes it increasingly perceptible. Each painting is another enactment of the same ritual, yet remains a singular, unrepeatable event.
In this sense, Leśnik’s painting is performative. Performativity here does not mean a spectacular or staged action. Rather it means that the meaning of the image does not precede the process of its creation. The sign is born within the act itself. The zigzag becomes an image through repeated movements, concentration, hesitation and the passage of time. These signs convey no decipherable message, nor do they point to a meaning existing beyond themselves. They are traces rather than words. Nor do they tell us what the artist felt. Instead, they make it perceptible that he was there, in front of the canvas, for a particular length of time, performing particular movements. In Leśnik’s own words, painting is the state of “tu i teraz”, of the “here and now”: an encounter with the picture plane at a particular moment in time, and a means of experiencing one’s own condition. The image becomes, in this sense, the residue of an encounter: the shared trace of the painter’s body and attention, and the resistance of the canvas.
The works in this exhibition sometimes form pairs, echoing or counterpointing one another, yet they are not simply variations on the same pattern. Opposing states recur throughout the oeuvre: saturated surfaces are set against empty space, complete sequences of zigzags against their remnants, angular forms against circles, and vivid colours against white or black monochromes.
At times, a rhythm excending across the entire pictorial field contracts into a single fragment of a sign positioned at the centre, while elsewhere the painted frame—the passe-partout itself—becomes the defining element of the composition.
At first glance, then, we see order: recurring V-shapes, zigzags, rows, circles and clearly defined pictorial fields. Yet as we step closer, playfulness and the joy of presence emerge from behind the rules. The compositions are disciplined, but never rigid. Clashing colours, the unexpected appearance of circles, and patterns that spill beyond their boundaries or almost disappear, all repeatedly bring the system into play.
For more than forty years, Leśnik has not been repeating the same form; he has been testing everything that might still happen to it. And perhaps this is where his work ultimately return to the point Ludwiński recognized in 1984: to the moment before the sign acquires a fixed meaning, when making art means, above all, touching a surface and leaving a trace behind.
Katica Kocsis, art writer
Photos from the opening
