Above The Light, 2026

Lukasz Olek   Emerging artists

"Above The Light" belongs to my ongoing series of abstract landscape paintings, in which real places, journeys and memories are transformed into fields of colour, light and texture.

The inspiration behind this painting is a warm summer evening in an open landscape — a meadow stretching towards the horizon, the last sunlight touching the grass and a vast sky still holding the warmth of the day. It is one of those brief moments when nothing spectacular needs to happen. There is simply space, light and the quiet joy of being there.

My method begins with landscape but gradually moves towards abstraction. I imagine taking a very narrow fragment of a real view and stretching it across the entire canvas. Details disappear, while the fundamental structure remains: sky, horizon, meadow, distant trees. The landscape becomes a sequence of horizontal fields and traces of colour.

The surface is created through numerous layers of acrylic paint. Colours are covered, scraped and revealed again, leaving scratches, irregular marks and fragments of previous layers visible beneath the final image. From a distance the composition appears calm and minimal; up close, it becomes a complex textured abstract painting.

Music is another part of this process. The titles of my works are connected to songs associated with particular journeys, places or emotional states. They form a kind of sonic diary in which sound and landscape become inseparable from memory.

"Above The Light" is not an imagined abstraction. It is a contemporary landscape painting reduced to the sensation of a summer evening — warmth, openness, freedom and light remembered after the place itself has disappeared.