The Polish-born artist Leszek Skurski, who studied at the Gdansk Academy of Art, repeatedly devotes his monochrome painting to figurative narrative. In his works, he depicts many small and large stories that remain open on all sides. They are images of standstill, of pausing and persisting in an action, out of an attitude, which he captures in concentrated form and narrative density.
Read MoreMany evanescent moments of an existence or togetherness are captured on the canvas: like excerpts from a sequence, like snapshots between their appearance and disappearance. In this way, they are reminiscent of film stills or still images that reveal a content, a character, or a mood. In other words, they refer to a scene that began outside the representation and continues there, which is captured in the image, which comes to rest here, so to speak. In this sense, the artist today, in the times of rapid floods of information and images, concentrates again and again on the “one” image that tells a whole story. In doing so, he shows many things from a distance and thus gets particularly close to what is happening.
He renders his subject from a distance in small, sometimes blurred views that sharpen the eye for the whole, for the concrete. In the works of Leszek Skurski, which have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Europe, the USA and South Africa, the image of man is always at the center of the representation. From the beginning, his interest has been in the ‘living being’, initially still in large form and strong color, in shadowy physicality. Today his figures are reduced to the essential: To a vanishingly small black figure in expressive posture and gesture, taken out of their surroundings, rendered in an environment that is sometimes only fragmentarily hinted at, but for the most part completely blanked out. And this in favor of a largely object-free surface, which spreads out on the canvas in bright painting, rich in shades.
