Under twenty thousand stones
Updated: Sep 17
If you were entrusted with something so precious that it should never again be seen, where would you choose to conceal it? Beneath a heap of twenty thousand stones? In the hollow belly of an ancient tree? At the bottom of a lake where light no longer reaches? You might build around it a fortress of black stone and iron gates. Yet the more you withdrew it from sight, the greater its secret would grow. What could possibly lie behind so many walls? And soon, without ever having seen it, all would lend it the dances of their dreams.
Let us give it neither rampart nor guardian, and bury it no longer. Let us instead leave it among us, exposed to the familiarity of passing eyes, clothed in an appearance common enough that the gaze might encounter it without ever thinking to question it. For there may be a surer way to disappear than to seek shelter.
From 21 to 23 August 2026, painter Lessia took over T-SPACE Gallery in Antwerp with A Nest for Tomorrow. Seven paintings, created between 2024 and 2026 and carefully selected for the occasion, formed the heart of this first solo exhibition. The ensemble made no claim to being a retrospective, still less an inventory.
Time has its little ironies. It wears out the young, teaches the old to twirl again, and somehow leaves the past to tell us something about what comes next. Lessia paints this vitality. She cuts, brings together, distorts, and sometimes renders with astonishing precision what she had nevertheless begun to forget. Then the painting begins to waltz. Two beats are enough: one for play, the other for reality. One steps forward as the other steps back, before the roles reverse. Between them, bodies metamorphose and fragments reassemble without ever quite returning to their original place. The past is already no longer what it was, and the future seems, in places, to have found itself turned upside down.
This ambivalence extends even to the objects. Small red spheres travel from one canvas to another, now pearls, now berries, without the eye ever quite knowing where one ends and the other begins. Two years apart, the same shapes resurface, yet seem to have changed roles along the way. Roots intertwine like blood vessels; the vegetal borrows from the body, and the body from the vegetal. One is left dizzy. A kind of diplopia runs through the whole, between the young and the old, until it becomes difficult to tell who is truly leading the dance. Should we trust the old and regard the new as its corrupted form? Or has the old already been surpassed, leaving only a bitter taste that still lingers on the present’s tongue? Between the two, neither original nor copy seems able to hold its place for long. The double always ends up unsettling the one who thought they had brought it into being; what is born from us extends us just as much as it replaces us.
At some point, the images had to leave the walls and pass into people’s hands. The Pysanka workshop thus opened another space within the exhibition, devoted to Lessia’s Ukrainian heritage and to that which can only truly be preserved through transmission. Around the table, no one was entirely a spectator, nor entirely a master: a gesture was shown, repeated, altered, then passed on to the next person. And so the eggs became worlds. Across their surfaces reappeared the sun, plants, animals, and those signs that centuries have carried far beyond the hands that first traced them. Alongside these came more intimate figures, sometimes deliberate, sometimes found by chance through the movement of the hand. Each person seemed to discover within this small, enclosed form enough room to house an alphabet of their own. The agalma perhaps found its strangest form here: no longer merely a treasure kept within, but a world turned inside out like a glove, its secret coming to rest upon the shell. Ancient signs sat beside those invented only minutes earlier, without either necessarily holding greater authority than the other. The egg could then return to a nest, carrying with it something to hatch tomorrow...
