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Graduated from the Opole University of Technology in 2012, Damian Lechoszest shows particular familiarity and skill in drawing from an early age, which is why his primary school plastic art teacher decides to personally take care of him and give him lessons in his own art studio. Damian Lechoszest is a perfectionist in his field and is able to physically destroy a work of art if it does not completely satisfy him. Lechoszest considers the direct impression of the viewer as the most important factor to take into account in his work, which is why he is interested in psychology, vision neurology, philosophy and mysticism in order to understand which factors influence perception and sight the most.
Lechoszest is a figurative artist who finds the maximum expression in the realization of portraits which, although considered the most difficult part of figurative art, in him seem to be more real than reality. This is because his concept of portrait does not include any detail and is more similar to impressionism and abstractionism than realism. It may seem a contradiction but it is not, because, as he says: “Through evolution, we have been conditioned to simplify the things we can see in order to respond quickly to symbols and survive. This is how abstract forms become more important than reality and evoke emotions. Therefore, good abstraction can evoke emotions through a combination of colours, a play of light and shadow, shapes, textures…”. In simple terms, the artist intensifies the visual stimulus by depriving it of the conditioning to which life accustoms us to draw attention to the inner self: the child who lives, repressed by the conditioning in each of us.
His aim in art is to reproduce beauty, but he does not do so by recreating a simple copy of what the naked eye perceives, but by creating a narrative, something capable of finding fertile ground between the meanders of the unconscious, in the most remote part of the human individual.
Even if ideas arise from the observation of nature, for Damian Lechoszest the process of painting is a form of meditation and when he paints he closes himself in his studio, a room with grey and black walls, colors that do not affect his palette. He personally prepares his canvases to be painted, for the almost uses the canvas of a Belgian company, this because the preparation goes to influence the rendering of the color on the canvas that help him to work at his best. If in large paintings he dedicates a lot of time to preparatory drawings, with small ones he only uses a background painting with diluted paint and the definition of the individual blocks. The selected work is a masterpiece of beauty understood exactly as the artist conceives it. In fact, it manages to capture my inner self, letting the memories of a child emerge, when instead of geese plucked the chickens and between a story and another of my grandmother and aunts, my dreamy spirit and my creativity was shaped. An emotionally heartening image capable of reconciling the experience of the past, the grandmother, with the contemporaneity represented by the sensuality of the two girls learning “Life Lessons”.
Image on the title: Life Lessons by Damian Lechoszest. Oil on canvas. 40×60″.
