Laboratory of the Internal Detox
Łukasz Majcherowicz’s workshop at the Warsaw Academy (of Fine Arts) has a genius loci. The corridor is filled up with students and the buzz of voices but there, behind the closed doors, is silence. One can loose his/hers sense of place and time. The haste, the hurry and the visual memory jammed with various rubbish re-sets there. All that remains is the whisper of humble intriguing paintings and an absent look of their author.
To Łukasz’s paintings one could pray like they do to the icons. I have had a similar impression of a spiritual colour when I looked at expressionistic paintings by Mark Rothko. In both cases a piece of art encourages contemplation and becomes a kind of a guide on a journey inside oneself. Rothko allows you to vanish in the swathes of colour, Majcherowicz tells you to follow a narrow path of colour, closer and closer to the hot centre of the painting, to gradually engross oneself in the mystery and then to return to the outside edges of the canvas. One’s eye can take this trip back and forth, from the outside to the centre of the painting many times without getting bored or tired. It may remind one of a litany or a mantra – multiple repetitions bring one to the trance-like state of absence, disconnection. This is a cleansing power of that painting. Łukasz Majcherowicz’s mural workshop is a laboratory of the internal detox.
