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All Gilewicz's painting projects are created in specific environments and fit their context through perfect mimicry. The artist's skill – which creates illusions able to make the paintings almost imperceptible to the viewer – is not, however, a goal in itself. Gilewicz, it seems, is not only a painter but also an epistemologist, who, through deceptive appearance, attempts to capture the essence of his medium and uncover the truth about perception in general. His visual experiments challenge the perceptive powers of the audience, while generally not going beyond painting and its characteristic means of expression.
In Gilewicz's latest project, created at Entropia Gallery, the role of the audience is to search for paintings in the city space. For a few weeks preceding the exhibition the artist painted 'from nature' in Wrocław's Market Place and its surroundings. Later on, a few locations in the Market Place were turned into an exhibition space for his paintings – masterful illusions of architectural pieces. However, the outdoor exhibition was only one part of the project's dual idea. The other part was a video showing how the paintings were placed in the selected locations (joint work of the author and Entropia Gallery). It was needed to complete and explain the project, as it is not possible to experience and at the same time discover and observe an illusion. The video was screened at the exhibition opening, alongside other fascinating documentaries of Gilewicz's actions, and will accompany the project to its end. It reveals how illusions, including their topography, are created. In the case of paintings that are so perfectly camouflaged (and probably in other cases too) this is the prerequisite for an experience of illusion to reach the consciousness.
Gilewicz's exhibition can be viewed as a multi-faceted dislocation. The gallery space contains only a precise map and film visualisation, while the actual paintings are located in the city space. However, there is more to it than that – it is a project in progress, involving time and chance. The paintings exposed to weather and unpredictable human actions will certainly blend even more with their urban surroundings, will be destroyed or disappear altogether. After a few months the surviving ones will be put on display at Entropia.
Looking for paintings in one's surroundings, in the city or in nature, is the opposite of the situation in which one must first look at reality as it were a potential painting, and this means almost the Copernican revolution in the habits of not only art consumers. The power of appearance stirs intellectual anxiety and stimulates reflection on the art of painting, the problem of representation, and perception in general. The inhabitants of Plato's cave, who can see nothing but shadows, and people living in the world of images (not only those produced by art) need this sort of debunking to be able to see not only what one knows but to notice anything at all. Besides, Gilewicz makes us aware that we do not notice images in reality and reality in images. For a long time art has operated within its own functional framework in which paintings have been interpreted as a reflection of the artist's idea. Moving beyond this interpretative framework and out of the gallery space opens up new possibilities for painting and restores its strength.
In Gilewicz's art the perception of reality is not as important as the perception of reality through art linked with the search for a place, new position and vital foundation of art. The basic problem is the representation itself – so perfect that it creates an illusion of reality. Illusion, long regarded as an anachronistic aspect of the work of art, regains its artistic role here. On the one hand, the perfect illusion by which the paintings blend with their context seems to undermine the status of painting as visual art. On the other hand, revealing the mechanism of illusion confirms the relevance of the essential problems of art. Illusion is not a mechanism of equating art with nature – it is a distinctive feature of art. Hegel noted that – as opposed to the thick shell of nature and ordinary world, neither of which reveals itself as illusory – art reveals itself as appearance and therefore enables us to gain access to ideas. And in the realm of art, it is painting, which exists on a two-dimensional surface, that must change the spatial forms of objects into an artistic, two-dimensional illusion.
The context of Gilewicz's art is not only specific landform and architectural features – that is, pieces of physical reality – but also the virtual reality of the chaos of images and ideas. Nowadays, relativistic physics has undermined the results of observation and the status of experience, McLuhan has done the same to the references of the message and medium, and the global media is downgrading the status of non-virtual reality and commercialisation. But philosophy has always raised doubts regarding perception and the conditions of cognition. This is evidenced by the first epistemological thesis of European philosophy: Heraclitus' 'Ears and eyes are bad witnesses to men having barbarian souls.' Art has always tried to harness the visual chaos of reality, while Gilewicz attempts to harness the notional chaos of art by deploying a sort of cognitive theory. And he does it in an attractive and very radial way.
Gilewicz's paintings depict landscape, interior details, pieces of building elevations, objects and heaps of things. It is rarely the case that they exist, as Hegel would say, in themselves and for themselves. Even when they are where paintings are supposed to be – that is, on an exhibition wall – they are not meant to be themselves but to disturb the indifference of the mirror of perception.
Gilewicz's art blurs even the most basic distinction between figurative and abstract painting. It represents what it hides, so one possibility would be to regard it as realistic or even hyper-realistic if not for the fact that its goals are different and the paintings themselves can function as pure abstractions in other contexts. Even more inappropriate would be the clue of illusionist painting, though that is the first thing that comes to mind. Gilewicz's deceptive paintings do not enlarge interiors, do not suggest other spaces, do not function as decoration and do not use the favourite illusionist trick – perspective. 'Trompe l'oeil' is not the goal but merely the starting point. Another doubtful clue: perhaps Gilewicz, who works beyond all styles and divisions, is a streeter? He often places his works in public spaces and leaves them to chance. But streeters seem to have a different goal in mind – to mark their territory. Even Truth, the most tender among these 'barbarians,' who carefully integrates his constructivist gems into the street space, gives himself the chance to be noticed – due to the form of his works and clarity of composition. Gilewicz's ideally camouflaged paintings may, just the opposite, become the anonymous ground for the actions of streeters, just like any other part of the street.
Gilewicz's paintings represent the very idea of representation, and, as such, constitute the notional deconstruction of painting done using the means of painterly representation. The paintings are created as works of art with an intrinsic value and, perhaps most importantly, built as theoretical objects that reveal the impossibility of telling the difference between the represented and the representation. The audience may greet any subject or problem with indifference, except for the ones in which it is involved by the very fact of using their senses. In this way the aporia of painting showing its ideological contradictions is at the same time its total affirmation.
