Leja’s work explores queer embodiment through a visceral, painterly lens, drawing on memory, desire, and the architecture of intimacy. A trained architect turned artist, Leja brings structural precision into his figurative oil paintings, often repurposing discarded canvases and surfaces found in the urban landscape. His compositions feature contorted bodies and spectral gestures, building dreamlike, eroticised spaces that sit somewhere between memory and fantasy. These images do not seek to idealise the queer male body but to expose its rawness—its hunger, its solitude, its unresolved tenderness.

His visual language fuses European Catholic iconography with contemporary queer imagery, often integrating personal history with shared cultural codes. At times autobiographical, his paintings echo the complexities of being queer in post-communist Poland and the charged promise of queer liberation in the United States. Across media—including photography, collage, and textile—Leja’s work centres themes of domesticity, sensuality, and queer kinship, offering an archive of bodies that are both wounded and defiant. The affective charge of his practice emerges not from spectacle, but from a quiet, insistent intimacy that disrupts the boundaries between viewer and subject.