what I did when no one was holding my hands
is sleeping tired in the corner of my eye
I could take it out, weed it out, pull it out with a needle or the tip of a knife, something sharp that I’m familiar with, and watch it heal slowly, a fragment of me shaped like the empty half of a bed.
it has grown over with fresh flesh and does not hurt at all, there is only this new weight on everything I dare to look at.
only sometimes does it catch a ray of sunshine and reflect it straight into the centre of your pupil, and burns, so I try to live with my gaze fixed firmly somewhere near my feet, letting my eyelashes grow like roots
thus I burn holes in the toes of all my shoes, nothing escapes me, maybe only
the most beautiful day of summer

Kornel Leśniak

“I cannot reach the objects I touch” is an exhibition about closeness which is not always possible. About relationships and experiences in which presence and contact do not guarantee full participation. It is also a story about the body, which remembers more than we can name, and which often remains caught between apparent normality and a sense of lack, incompleteness, and the difficulty of being fully seen and understood. Perhaps you know the feeling? Being close, yet somewhat distant. What does your body do then? Does it try to get closer, or rather to withdraw? The title, taken from Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, becomes a point of reference for the work of Kornel Leśniak – an artist working with oil painting, embroidery and the written word.
Leśniak’s work focuses on building intimate worlds in which emotions and relationships become the main characters. Different media are treated as equivalent tools for recounting the experience of being in a relationship – both with others and with oneself. The presented works stem from personal experiences of queer anxiety, physicality, and the need to belong. At the same time, they create a language of empathy, in which individual stories become shared. It is a language based on fragility and suspension – on being “in between,” in relationships that last but do not always provide a sense of complete security or recognition.
While working on the paintings, the artist used Bessel van der Kolk’s book not as theoretical support, but as an emotional reference point. Fragments concerning difficulties in experiencing intimacy, bodily confusion, shame, and the need for relationships accompanied the painting process and influenced the way of thinking. Their presence is not literal in the works – rather, it reveals itself in the subtle tension between the possibility of contact and its incompleteness.
Blue becomes the dominant element of the exhibition – present both in the paintings and in the space itself. It envelops, calms and slows down. Blue has a regulating function – it symbolises safety, calmness and an attempt to tame difficult emotions. At the same time, it serves as a backdrop for stories about fragility and the need for closeness. In his latest works, blue is accompanied by light pink – subtle, illuminating, present like a small gesture of tenderness towards oneself and others, attempting to fill what is often lacking in relationships.
I cannot reach the objects I touch is an invitation to attentively encounter the image, the text, and one’s own body. The exhibition leaves space for pause, silence and reflection. Perhaps this is where the opportunity for a momentary sense of security in shared experience arises.
Karolina Rybka

Kornel Leśniak (born in 1999) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Using oil paintings, the written word and large-format fabrics, he explores the issue of empathy strategies and emotional phenomena occurring at the points of contact between various aspects of collective generational experience. His works touch upon themes of gender, queer anxiety, physicality, the need to belong, romantic anxiety and uncertainty, nostalgia, and identity.

exhibition curator: Karolina Rybka

Open 06.02.2026, 18:00
3 Gdańska St.
End 25.04.2026