First prize in violin at the Warsaw Conservatory, swallowed up, tossed about in the turmoil of the 20th century, his father, who had become a miner for a time in Canada and then in the north of France, advised his little boy to seek a light other than that of the reality he was experiencing. "The world we see is not reality," he told him. "It only has the appearance of reality.", taking the iceberg as an example, whose reality that escapes vision is located beneath the surface of the water.
Having attended seminary, then studied philosophy, all of Ladislas Kijno's work tends towards the quest for the sources of the sacred.
In 1983, the artist and his wife accompanied their friend Chu Teh-Chun to China. From the South to the borders of Mongolia, this two-month journey brought about a great inner upheaval in the artist. In his studio he then created the cycle “Return from China” (1983-1984), a kind of catalysis of impressions, notes taken and hasty sketches made in situ.
So, I cannot resist the pleasure of erasing myself, and sharing the artist’s words:
“Isn’t the great revelation of painting the revelation of these places that we would not seek if we had not already found them? We must be where we must be. We must travel to try to go further. Life, already, is a journey and this journey is a big question mark, because any certainty, a priori, is suspect.
There are painters who do not leave the studio, but they still travel by a certain inner wandering. I go out, I must go out. I am the son of a Polish immigrant who never stopped moving and telling me stories of travels. I feel deeply in my painting that I am a migrant. I do not travel only to see works, men, landscapes;
I travel to know the places where my work is situated in the architecture of the world.
I do not know where I am going but I know that I am going to meet something else, which will disturb my visual field and which, later, in the studio, will nourish the field of metamorphosis and realities to be transformed".
