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1. You examine the potential of painting. Even though you work in public space, you’ve chosen the traditional medium. You’ve demonstrated its unlimited possibility of creation. Its visual layer may be subject to constant manipulation e.g. through modification according to weather conditions (Biała Gallery, 2000). A painted substitute can stealthily replace space (Foksal Gallery, 2005) or create one that is impossible (Rozmaitości Theatre, 2005). A painting may even repair a hole in the pavement (Entropia Gallery, 2006).
When I first started to think seriously about getting involved in art, I chose the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznań. Among my colleagues from artistic high school, it enjoyed the opinion of the most liberal in Poland. I started to study painting and the first thing I heard was ‘painting is dead’. When they said ‘nothing is new’, it seemed even harder to defend this traditional medium. In Warsaw, I attended the workshop ran by Leon Tarasewicz, which showed me how to discover new paths in painting, preserving the traditional approach to the sheer technique, though. What’s more the workshop opened my eyes to photography. The subsequent step after the photo camera was the video camera, or actually short movies made with a digital photo camera. I have already witnessed ‘the triumph of painting’ as well as the recent outburst of interest in Polish art worldwide. Yet, as an artist, I haven’t genuinely benefited from any of these phenomena. For me, little has changed and I consistently follow my own way.
Last year I began a new project in New York. It features classic oil paintings, painted on an easel in the studio, instead of public space for the first time since five years ago. No photography, no video. I do hope, however, that I will manage to create a similar illusion and to confuse the audience
2. A question that came to my mind in Wrocław concerns the sheer works and the vision of the gallery exhibition. When you distributed the map to the audience, your paintings started to disappear from the places where you had left them. Consequently, significantly fewer of them made it to the gallery. What is your approach to such radical collectors’ interference?
The only thing that I planned was to paint the works and ‘conceal’ them within the urban tissue of the Wrocław’s Market Square. Everything that happened subsequently to the paintings, and that has been happening to them until now, as the exhibition finishes in June, is a mystery and a risk that decided to take. I don’t know whether the paintings are disappearing because of the collectors, vandals or due to any other, more or less accidental circumstances. I might find out something more about it when I visit Entropia in June on the occasion of closing the project.
To some extent, the project came into being as a result of a surplus of images – both these in our visual environment and the works in my studio as well as my willingness to solve the problem somehow. If I was to produce the following paintings, I wanted them to be indistinguishable from their surroundings. And if thus twenty subsequent canvases were to arrive at my studio after the exhibition, then why not expose them to the risk of ‘getting lost’ and extend the display time from several weeks to half a year. These were more or less the basic premises of the exhibition. I was unable to foresee anything, though, for example that my painting joke as an ‘homage to Richter’ would get covered with a thick layer of mud and merge with the venue where it stood.
3. What do you consider to be the value of the sheer paintings, deprived of the context of the venue where they were created?
It is the same as that of the majority of abstract paintings without their context. Would we perceive the ‘Black Square’ in the same way knowing nothing about Malevich, Constructivism and the revolution of the early 20th century as we do now, being utterly aware? I guess it’s difficult to talk about any art without its context.
My works, which imitate flagstones, windowsills, electricity cases etc. in the urban space, become abstract paintings on a white gallery wall. They can be taken in on two contradictory levels – that of figurative, or rather hyperrealist imitation of fragments of reality and that of abstraction.
4. What is going to happen to the layers that grew on the surface of paintings throughout the year? Are you going to limit this natural, urban interference before exhibiting the works at the gallery?
What appeared on the paintings during that time is as integral a part of them as what had been painted by me earlier. I am curious about these changes and I don’t isolate them from my work. The paintings are subject to an influence on the part of people, weather conditions and other factors, and all that happens to them leads to merging them better with reality. They get covered with dust, mud, birds’ guano and posters that are hung on them, or they simply disappear in various circumstances. Painting penetrates reality. It mimicks it. Yet it is often the case that the environment modifies work to such an extent that it debunks and unmasks painting. After all, when a painting that imitates a flagstone has got run over by a car, it does no longer imitate anything. What remains is a broken board with stretched, primed canvas covered with oil paints.
My exhibition in Wrocław was composed of a video presented at the gallery as well as paintings installed within the urban tissue. In June, the paintings that survived are going to be on display for a few days and I myself wonder how it will look like. Exhibition of paintings at Entropia Gallery is not the focal point of my project, though. It is going to be only a summary of what happened to the works.
5. I was thinking about the projects from New York in 2004. Back then you placed the canvases on an illegal refuse dump in Brooklyn, somebody cleaned the place but the paintings remained intact. Or in Soho, where renovation works unexpectedly occurred ahead of your action and before you even completed the paintings, the building was already revitalised. Your works thus brought back the earlier state. These projects must have been a great mystery to the attentive audience, who could do nothing but suspect the reasons for the interference that they noticed. When I compare these projects with the one in Wrocław, I question myself if the situation should really be made so easy for the audience by creating a map. By installing the paintings in Kuźnicza Street, you created a sort of alternative reality, with the street turning into exhibition space. Personally, I found it very intriguing that it was not the same street, that something was there and I had to trace it. I decided to try without the map. I felt that walking along the walls, knocking at them, seeking the traces of interference was much more inspiring than finding a painting immediately with a map.
I am surely going to carry out a project one day where paintings will become invisible and the audience will be given no hints whatsoever. For me, though, the limits of this kind of painting will thus have been reached. But maybe the works in New York have already been like this. I did not prepare any map, since there was no one to distribute it to. Apart from me, only three people were aware of the action. It was a project with no gallery, no invitations, no opening night nor audience. I would say it was a kind of pure painting, which is non-commercial, radical or even guerrilla-like (the paintings were installed at night with no permission).
In Wrocław, you were given a map indeed but you could choose whether to use it or not. Either with or without it, you didn’t manage to find the largest painting, which was fixed under one of the British Council windows and is still there to the best of my knowledge. You represent the perfect, educated audience, but I try to take into account also those who are not art history graduates and those who visit the exhibition by chance, with no prior knowledge whatsoever about what they might expect and look for.
The part of my work that attracts me very much is balancing the two polar layers of figuration and abstraction – the definite and tangible and the invisible and imperceptible. It seems to me that my projects are conceptual and hermetic but they can also prove visually attractive and interesting for lay audience.
6. Looking at your projects, it seems to me that at the beginning painting and photography supported each other in representing what appeared to be an identity of place. In ‘City – Estate – Studio – Apartment’ the duet of photography and painting broadened our cognition of an element of reality. At Biała Gallery in 2000 and Foksal Gallery in 2005 it was photography that constituted the illusion of an image. In your present works, the ways of painting and photography are becoming increasingly parted. Personally, I would say that by means of painting you describe places, their changes in time, natural corrosion, the history of various interventions. You narrow down the perspective to ever smaller units. Video recording is used during your actions to register the creation of illusion, although it does not intensify it.
You are right, in the works that you’ve mentioned, it is photography that creates an illusion and registers it at the same time. If it hadn’t been for a fixed photo camera and a particular observation point, illusion would not have been achieved neither at Biała nor at Foksal. But the time came when it started to disturb me that I needed the support of photography to better demonstrate the illusion in painting. That’s why I turned to video, which guides you to a painting, indicates where it is but also exists on an independent basis, like e.g. in Paris, in Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe. Or it may also be singlehandedly responsible for the artistic effect, like in Macedonia, because even though the film is about images and perverse possibilities of “applying” painting to our environment, the paintings themselves do not appear on view, since they even don’t exist anymore. Yet, such considerations can tire you out, can’t they? It’s like asking me if I feel like a painter. I do indeed, but I want to contradict painting by painting. That’s a combination of victory and defeat.
When I go to see an exhibition of someone’s paintings, I am always most intrigued by the works that I cannot factorise and understand their mechanism. I would like my projects to be structured and perceived in a similar fashion.
7. Photographically, you’ve concentrated on the ‘Them’ series, which is being constantly developed and constitutes a form of self-analysis, a search for your own identity. In the latest pictures, you render your own image more varied than before. You juxtapose ‘yourselves’ from different moments of the past, which may easily trick into thinking that we are dealing with two different persons. It might actually be true that the passage of time alters the identity, hence it is no longer possible to say that it is still the same person.
The time between taking one half of a picture and the other is usually not more than an hour, but it’s true that in the meantime I try to make myself look different. I don’t suffer from identity disorders, although the life that I’ve been living for several years now has a slightly dissociating effect on me. In Warsaw it is arranged and somewhat predictable. I am an artist, I am ambitious and I do exhibitions in venues with an interesting artistic framework. I don’t make much money out of it, though. When in New York, I live week to week, often moving houses with my stuff packed in two boxes and working as a waiter with no fixed schedule. I am not represented by any gallery there. This is only one of the many layers of dualism. I’ve been practising yoga for over a year now, which is nothing else than a search for unity of the separated spirit and body. Yoga also has an extremely sensual, even erotic dimension for me.
Several years ago, I suddenly felt that I needed to make a more personal statement, that the conceptual path in painting was no longer sufficient for me. I like the ‘Them’ series because it is a sort of an autobiography, where even ordinary things can function as universal signs and symbols.
The series is also an insight into the sheer medium of photography and this is the level where most references to my earlier, painting-photography projects are to be found. I insist on developing the photos without a computer, they are not a collage either, since the entire negative is evenly exposed. So what is true and what is not? Which of these persons is the real me?
8. Recently, you’ve shown the ‘Them’ series in New York...
The curator of the exhibition came across my photos on the Internet and invited me to participate in the exhibition ‘Imago: The Drama of Self-Portraiture in Recent Photography’. Going there, I absolutely didn’t know what to expect, but the gallery prepared everything in a very professional manner, including the catalogue available on the opening day. Other participating artists were, among others, Orlan (a person who interested me a lot when I was in high school) and Lyle Ashton Harris, who also exhibited his works at the Whitney Museum at the same time.
At present, when artists have to take their networking seriously, attend opening nights for the sake of self-promotion and get into good books of as many curators as possible, such lucky cases as mine are a pleasant surprise. It was a positive experience which confirmed that it is worth doing your own thing and not waiting for the 15 minutes of fame, since you can never predict that moment. If it happens at all, it is surely still ahead of me.
9. You talk of an inner dialogue, seeking a friend in yourself. Actually, when I observed the developing discourse on these works, I constantly came across the theme of solitude, however, it seems to me that there is something more to the images.
The first impression is that we are dealing with a homosexual relationship. You pose in numerous private situations, once you even practice walking in high-heeled shoes. Apart from that, the content of the ‘Love and Democracy’ exhibition is also a step towards extended interpretation.
The shoes appeared as a matter of playing on convention. What I lacked was a lipstick... I had very long hair and I was living at a house of a lesbian, who also had a boyfriend at that time. There were many books in the house and I was reading ‘The Idiot’.
Indeed, sexual identity of the people in my photos is ambiguous.
Why is one man seating on a bath when the other is inside? This implicit relation was only hinted at in the first photos, so that the audience could sense what I didn’t want to express openly. The recent photos, which I haven’t exhibited yet, are more straightforward. However, the graduated filter that I use prevents the persons from getting together. Even though they are close to each other, they will never touch.
10. You are coming back to Poland soon. What are your plans?
This year I was awarded the Młoda Polska grant for developing the ‘Them’ series. I am working on new photos and preparing a publication that I hope to present at the end of the year on the occasion of the exhibition at the Biała Gallery. Right now, the works are on display at the Ego Gallery in Poznań as a part of the Photography Biennial. In May, I am going to start preparations for the exhibition in Sanok, which is to open in October. It will feature ‘repairing’ parts of reality with painting. I was invited to participate in the ‘One-way street’ exhibition, an appendix to ‘Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture’ at the Museum of Art in Łódź. In October, I am visiting the Museum of Art in Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine in order to produce a video with paintings breaking away from reality and literally ‘crashing’ into the pavement. In the meantime, I am going to Orońsk to prepare works for the Young Artist Biennial. I think that by the end of the year I will be in New York again.
