Leon Tarasewicz
A wall painting necessarily enters into a relationship with the space in which it is placed. Sometimes this relationship is contained within the conventional limits of a frame or a border; in other cases, it is pushed to the extreme interpenetration with the architecture.
This is what happens with the pictorial work carried out in 2004–2005 by Leon Tarasewicz at the Perusini Agricultural Estate in Gramogliano, inside the tower designed by Augusto Romano Burelli.
Tarasewicz orchestrates a comprehensive, organic reading of the space of this building, certainly not neutral, yet homogeneous in its constant variations of wavelength.
In the stratigraphy of the painterly gesture, the tower is visually rhythmized in harmony with those horizontal lines that externally mark its connection to the countryside without compromising its vertical elevation.
With his rejection of large uniform areas in favor of constructing a fabric of color in parallel bands, whose flow is nonetheless tensioned through alternations of relief — here suggested by the deliberate irregularity of the brushstrokes, and previously achieved by exploiting the volume of the beams in his earlier intervention on the ceiling of Villa Kechler-Spanò, also in Friuli — it is as if Tarasewicz reads the internal volumes of the architecture in their gradual, careful convergence toward the top of the building.
Almost accompanying the ascent of the stairs, the gaze is guided through a chain of successive shifts in the tonal variations of the individual walls, determined, as on the horizon of the hills framed by the wide windows, by the geography of the place and the cardinal points.
The visual dynamism thus becomes an investigation of a traversed thickness, both by the visitor’s eyes and by the Foucault pendulum – at the center of the tower – which moves slowly down to the underground cellar, reaching even the abdominal cavity from which the sound vibration is produced, recorded by the painting.
Fulvio Dell’Agnese