Binary City
by Grzegorz Borkowski
Gilewicz in a very peculiar way is testing the limits of painterly illusion. His paintings, perfect replicas of details of reality in 1:1 scale, melt so well into the public space that it is impossible to locate them without the exact information where they are. His project Binary City consisted of two stages. In autumn 2003, Gilewicz placed in various spots across Warsaw four of his painted replicas, planning to remove them a couple of months later. When the time came, he found two of the paintings had gone missing, one, hanging on the wall of a wooden news-stand, had been twice painted a different color by the unaware owner, and only one had remained unchanged. In autumn 2006, the artist took the two “Warsaw” replicas and placed in Łódź in spots so chosen that they blended perfectly with the background. To make the illusion complete, he performed small painting interventions in the background. This gesture of the transplantation of images can be seen as a ritual unification of the two cities, or as a pursuit of the paradoxical possibilities of painting, which invariably prove surprising.
