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by Jan Gryka
Wojciech Gilewicz situates his artistic quest ‘between’ painting and photography.
It was already his diploma project at the Guest Workshop chaired by Leon Tarasewicz at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1999 that undertook the research on the links and relations between the two disciplines, blurring their boundaries and swapping their functions.
Paintings by Gilewicz are an extraordinary ‘barometer’ that reacts to time and space. By absorbing the context of events, they converge with a given situation, blending into it almost completely. An image thus constitutes both the outcome of the entire painting process and the pretext for the research on the context of the surroundings. The time of creation is the source and the reason for determining the emotional space. It resembles a sensitive mechanism that registers any possible states and phenomena emerging around the focal point: the artist and the painting. It may also happen that a photograph becomes a painting in order to be ‘converted’ into a photograph again. The painting and its entire process of creation is adjusted by the optical mechanism of the photo camera, which is posed at a certain distance from the canvas, determining the system of perception and the spatial relations. The subsequent stage of the painting activity comes to an end the moment when the discrepancies between the image and reality disappear completely. The artist registers this very fact by photographic means.
Wojciech Gilewicz’s exhibition at the Biała Gallery in Lublin embodies a similar kind of creative penetration. The artist took two weeks to create a painting (identical in size to one of the gallery walls) in a square near the cultural centre, saturating the entire situation with his own emotions, with behaviour of the passers-by and the painting-based reaction to radical changes in the weather. The project featured a particular context of the venue, where it was the path between the painting site and the place of photographing subsequent stages that became essential. ‘Other’ photographs from Wojtek’s residency in Lublin render it even more complete.
The exhibition extends its own context significantly, not abandoning, however, the premises of observing the world through the camera lens. The mechanical record registers the circumstances and situations that accompany the venue of image and exhibition creation, but above all, it preserves the consequences of the painting-related risk that was taken.
Art that goes beyond the gallery walls, returns there saturated with its own context of events, time, space, venue and passers-by, who incidentally become a part of the artistic record.
