2005, photograph, 10“ x 15“

2005, photograph, 10“ x 15“

2005, oil on canvas, different sizes

by Wiesław Borowski      

    Wojciech Gilewicz looks through a gallery window at a desolate park barely coming back to life after the snow has disappeared. Quite a common view: boughs and branches, with a fence and buildings in the background, and a big log of a once overturned oak lying rotten on the lawn that has not grown again yet after the winter. The painter chooses a segment of the horizon from the view and focuses his attention on it. From then on, he is interested in just three points on the line of the horizon. He wants to paint three pictures whose borders and motifs have revealed themselves so to say unaided in the three marked positions. He also wants to show – in a photograph – the whole view, with the painted pictures turned invisible. Invisible does not mean superfluous.

   Wojciech Gilewicz’s project is unconventional and simple at the same time. The landscape fascinates him not because of its beauty and his intention to paint a fine picture. Quite unlike we see it usually, is the manner the artist approaches the landscape and painting as such. In a novel way he wants to pay his respects both to nature, and, in reference to it, to the painter’s task.

    As the starting point, there were three blank canvases placed in the park at the chosen sites. Their shape and size came as a result of reiterated tests and calculations aiming at merging the canvas with the landscape to a highest degree possible. The painting process as such, continuing for many days, unveiled intriguing and inspiring paradoxes.The painter paints the landscape section veiled from his view by the unpainted painting, ‘from nature’. Once painted, the canvas initially blocking the view begins to impersonate it but, while merging with the view or rather substituting for it, the canvas vanishes from view: the image is invalidated. This can be seen in the photograph.

    Also paradoxical are the pictures when separated from the context of nature they are transferred to the gallery. Their shape and appearance diverge far from the image of nature they have so impeccably and at the same time so illusively represented or pretended to be. Yet they are an unquestionable and telling evidence of the painting process; they are also an essential, autonomous effect of it.

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Three Images
by Ewa Witkowska

     Wojciech Gilewicz’s project carried into effect specially for the Foksal Gallery combines reality and various manners of representing it: painting and photography. To begin with, the artist placed three white stretchers in the park adjacent to the gallery and fixed the arrangement in a photograph. How he had set out the blank canvases resulted from a series of tests and calculations. Photographed, the stretchers looked like three identical squares arranged in a straight line at an equal distance from the camera. Then Gilewicz painted over the blank canvases re-creating in each exactly what each stretcher had previously blocked the view of. The emergence of the paintings was a process subordinated to the optics of the camera positioned all the time where the artist had taken his first photograph of the white stretchers in the park. Gilewicz acknowledged his images as finished at a point when, looking at them through the camera, he was no longer able to single the painted canvases out against the surroundings. Then the artist took another photograph where the three paintings merge with the real world so ideally as to become indistinguishable. At first glance, what the photograph represents is simply a park section. If it had not been set against the photograph of white stretchers in a landscape, it would have been almost impossible to find the camouflaged paintings. In the end, the artist placed both photographs in the gallery interior, near the window through which the park can be seen. Three equal squares in the very first photograph, in the gallery the three canvases turned into figures in strange irregular shapes and quite different sizes. ‘I wanted to disrupt, not to integrate things,’ Gilewicz insisted. For he had apparently turned a section of reality combined with painting and photography into a strikingly consistent whole. Out of context, the final photograph would be simply one of a section of the park adjacent to the Foksal Gallery. No one would have guessed that the image represents paintings hidden in a landscape. However, what Wojciech Gilewicz did at the exhibition was to denude the illusion of art to the viewer. He uncovered the very procedure of constructing a world of painted make-believe. He thus shows that our reception of the world round us is relative and always depends on this or other type of perspective. The artist creates perfect illusion in which he engages the viewer, and then, in an instant, he shatters the illusion. The ideal squares turn into figures in irregular, ragged shapes, and what the pictures painted in the park represent, does by no means overlap with what the stretchers placed in the same landscape had blocked the view of.

     Wojciech Gilewicz had carried all sorts of play on the borderline between reality and photography before. His degree-winning project in Leon Tarasewicz’s studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts featured two photographs transferred onto canvas. One represented a landscape in the centre of which the artist had placed a blank stretcher. As in his project for the Foksal Gallery, Wojciech Gilewicz had apparently cut a white hole out of reality. The other photograph showed the landscape complete, for the artist had patched up the white hole by painting over the blank stretcher. The painted counterpart of the reality section had merged with it ideally so that artist’s intervention was almost imperceptible.

     Gilewicz conjured up a similar though even more complex arrangement at his exhibition at the Biała Gallery in Lublin in 2000. In the green adjacent to the gallery, the artist put a blank stretcher the size of one of the gallery walls, after which he spent two weeks working on his painting. Meanwhile the weather changed several times: the snow melted and fell again, and the grass was beginning to show. Gilewicz commemorated all these changes on the canvas, by which he made the image take semblance of reality on each successive day. As in his project for the Foksal Gallery, the painting process was coordinated here by the optical properties of the camera. The picture in the Lublin green might have taken infinitely long to emerge, and it might have taken different shapes according to the season. At a certain point, however, the artist must have decided on the conclusion of the creative process and set about transferring the ‘finished’ painting to the gallery. In fact, the final work concealed a wealth of paintings within. It might have as well further evolved.

     During his stay in New York in 2004, Wojciech Gilewicz executed painted works merging ideally with urban fabric. The artist covered a section of a scratched wall in the New York subway and the bricked up window recesses of a brick building in Soho with their precise painted replicas. The canvases reproduced with exceeding realism the peeling walls, the leaks, the inscriptions in sprayed paint, and remnants of removed posters. Gilewicz left the resulting images, abstract and representational at the same time, in the urban space for some time. He exposed his canvases to the atmospheric conditions, and he also accepted the risk of exposing them to damage or loss. Yet his interventions with the city’s reality had so ideally adjusted themselves to it as to remain unnoticed. Every day hundreds of people coming face to face with the huge picture installed by Wojciech Gilewicz at Greenpoint Avenue subway station remained quite unaware of the change introduced into their surroundings. Those passing the building in Soho did not even notice the three canvases placed by Gilewicz in the window recesses.

     So the artist had gone a step further. In a New York illegal dump heap, he found various flat objects, spanned canvas on their surface and painted over them, reproducing faithfully what was originally beneath. The resulting images were ideal impersonations of the sections of reality chosen by the artist. For over two months, Gilewicz’s paintings were part of the New York panorama with Manhattan in the background. Only the artist knew they were there.

     In that same year, on the premises of the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris, Wojciech Gilewicz made his painted replicas substitute for the sections of architecture he had selected. He covered a window, a windowsill, parts of the banister, basement windows and even flagstones with their faithful painted copies. Without Gilewicz’s special map, it would have been impossible to discover the paintings concealed in the architecture.

     Gino Severini writes that the unquestionable fact is that the three dimensions of ordinary space have never satisfied artists anxious to take possession of reality.1 Wojciech Gilewicz does not confine his work to the three dimensions of painter’s canvas either. Various manners of looking at reality interpenetrate in his works; painting intertwines with photography, and illusion of art blends with reality. In a work created by Gilewicz for the Foksal Gallery, we are looking at a park section chosen by the artist through the lens of painting and photography, and through a real window. By bringing to a clash different images of one and the same reality segment, the artist wants to show the relative quality of our vision of the surrounding world, and demonstrates how the border between the real and the imagined can be blurred.

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Gilewicz’s landscape camouflage at Foksal
by Anna Dzierżyc-Horniak

     Wojciech Gilewicz is focused predominantly on the landscape of the most immediate surroundings. Hence he imposes upon himself interesting painting tasks and manages to find intriguing solutions. The point of departure for the works on display at the Foksal Gallery was the installation of three white stretcher frames in the small park on the gallery’s premises. They were visible from the gallery’s window, which is usually covered.

    Using photographs, tests and calculations, thus tapping into the complete array of his methods of creating painting illusion, the artist created three works, which featured what they actually covered. The landscape was in a way patched by artistic means. The impression was that Gilewicz repaired the view from the window of the gallery. The paintings merged with the surroundings to such an extent that, looking from the window, one could hardly notice where they were. In a certain manner, they took the form of landscape camouflage.

    Yet these two visual situations were presented by Gilewicz at the exhibition exclusively in the form of small photographs, and it was the paintings brought from the park that constituted the focal point. It turned out that the canvases had no regular shape, since they had been adjusted to the perspective imposed by their position in the park and the observation point – the window. What once (in the park) constituted a clear illusion of reality, later (inside the gallery) resembled a sophisticated aesthetic action. 

    Engaging in an intellectual game with the audience, Gilewicz revealed the process of creating painting illusion, which became the focal theme of the exhibition. Through what was conducted, he demonstrated the relative nature of perception of our surrounding reality. Gilewicz encourages to watch and juxtapose several representations and views of the landscape. Including the view from the window of the gallery.

    Considering the earlier works of Wojciech Gilewicz, it seems as though he is intrigued by the sheer, often humdrum, process of creating illusion, and it is exactly this process that the artist considers to be as important as the ultimate effect of the work, or maybe even more vital and more fascinating. In the work ‘City-Estate-Studio-Apartment’, two paintings consisted of over 1000 pictures taken by the artist from the balcony of his apartment on the ninth floor of a tower block. Then, he openly declared: ‘I am interested in everything that is connected with the process of painting creation – steps and moves made by the painter at work, paint splashed beyond canvass. I believe I will be able one day to create a painting that will embrace everything that surrounds me, who I am and what I do’ (A. Kowalska in: Gazeta Wyborcza, 2.02.2001). In this project, he was building his own, imaginary landscape from the elements of the view seen on a daily basis. The landscape included the pictures of the surroundings, put together into one image, like a jjgsaw. Gilewicz is interested not only in ‘painting-in’ photographs of landscape into his works (City-Estate-Studio-Apartment), but also the reverse process of merging them with the real landscape (like during the presentation at Foksal).

        He seeks the ties that bind photography and painting. The artist finishes painting once the visible difference between the painting and its surroundings has disappeared completely; it is the painting that absorbs what it represents. This strategy had already been used by Gilewicz in April 2000 at the Biała Gallery in Lublin. Even more radical was the application of the ‘camouflage’ process at the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris, where a series of his oil paintings was installed within the architectural space, so that they became indistinguishable from their urban environment (see: Obieg 1/2005 pp.44-47). It has to be admitted that tricking the audience into seeking paintings concealed within reality is against almost all associations with painting whose function is to represent.

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