Looking at Jakub Leniart’s latest, monumental-scale paintings, I think about a transformation that is taking place: we have never seen a world like this before.

We have never seen these colours, consistent, uniform and unexpected. The paintings, rendered in a photorealist convention, surprise us with their orange palette. As if all the other colours had disappeared from the palette. Only oranges and blacks remain. Could it be that everything is taking place at sunset or in the light of bonfires or torches? Or perhaps some kind of colour filter has been applied? The painter would like to fill the gallery with the smell of tar — resinous, bitter, dark — similar to the smell of a fire that has gone out, so perhaps this is the right clue?

And then there is this ambiguous, enigmatic title, which the artist does not explain — The Extinguished. Who are these extinguished ones? It occurred to me that they are people living in a time of emotional incapacity, that we have found ourselves in a time after the end of love. Separate, isolated, left to themselves, suspended in this strange moment of the day, or perhaps between day and night. Or maybe this kind of light always shines in the world of “the extinguished”. Perhaps it is light from another galaxy. Perhaps it is the light of some other, new, unknown version of Lem’s Solaris. Perhaps it is light emanating from that planetary ocean, affecting our feelings and emotions...

Or perhaps it is complete nonsense to carry these stories out into space and into the future? Perhaps they are unfolding before our eyes, here and now, perhaps they even concern us ourselves? Perhaps these are our stories, only we have never seen them before in this kind of light, in these colours. Perhaps it is this unexpected tonality of the paintings that pushes my thoughts somewhere into cosmic indeterminacy, instead of allowing them to remain on Earth and among the living, though perhaps “extinguished”?

Bogusław Deptuła