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A House of Smoke

What is smoke? Is it a mixture of particles in the gaseous, liquid, and solid states of matter?
Is it a scent, a taste, a witness to the fire, or the curtain that obscures it?
In the pre-fridge era, smoke houses were a frequent occurrence along Chester river.
Smoke tests the limits of visual perception as particles vibrate at a frequency close to that of scattered light.
It comes into and goes out of sight, the smoke, the past.
We can or cannot see or sense its presence - and we can no longer call it present.

Historical pigments on partly carbonised antique wood paneling, found at the site of a hearth kitchen on the Eastern Shore.
With grateful thanks to generous friends O.W. and M.W.
Part of the SFW art residency, KCA, April 2025
© Radu Leon All rights reserved

Completing a PhD in History of Art in Venice in 2018, Radu Leon took the route of process-based investigations of historical art media to study the links between representation and memory. He taught the creative course on Canaletto’s drawing techniques during the exhibition ‘Canaletto & Art of Venice’ at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, tutored research students in London and in Venice, and shared his knowledge through workshops, lectures, exhibitions, residencies in Italy, Kenya, the UK, and the USA.
Around that same time, Radu’s work took a turn.
He asked: what in our nature moves us from the prosaic to the poetic?
Artworks, elaborated over years in the mind and then by fusing colours into lights, turn into anchors and sparks for the viewer’s own questions about representation.