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Wojciech Gilewicz in the spring 2000, during a painting action at Biała Gallery in Lublin, Gilewicz every day for two weeks repainted a picture placed in the park outside the gallery so that, seen from the gallery’s windows, it blended perfectly with its natural surroundings, as the changed because of weather. As a result, a total of fourteen layers of images of a single fragment of reality were placed on a single surface. Each consecutive layer of illusion invalidated the previous one, and the top layer was not the most important one but just the last one in the series. The flow of time was thus documented in the layers of the picture in a manner available to painting but unavailable, for instance to photography. The work of Wojciech Gilewicz (born 1974) often combines impressive painting skills with a seemingly simple, but pertinent, concept. He thus reveals a hard-to-express truth about the visible reality and its illusive depiction.
He used a seemingly similar trick at the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw (2005), placing, in a green seen from the gallery’s window, three specially prepared white canvas stretchers so that they looked like three identical squares placed at same height and the same distance from the window. Then he painted on each canvas the view that canvas obscured. In effect, it was impossible to distinguish the paintings from the surroundings. He photographed both the initial situation (the white canvases) and the situation when the three pictures blended with the surroundings. In the exhibition, he showed both photographs and the three paintings themselves. It then turned out the paintings had strange, irregular shapes and were of different sizes. Besides, they were not in photorealistic, even though they created such a convincing illusion. Gilewicz showed he was able to surprise the viewers by revealing just a fragment of the technology of creating illusion.
Another cognitive situation was prepared at the Deutsch de la Meurthe Foundation (2004). In one of the rooms of the Foundation’s offices, located in Paris’s university campus, a map of the area and several photographs were presented. They suggested that Gilewicz’s paintings had been inconspicuously placed in the park and on the walls of the buildings that the viewers had passed on their way. The viewers could now take a walk around the area to find out that, in their immediate surroundings, small details had been placed that were not real in the common sense of the word but instead were painted replicas of such details. Moreover, the illusionist canvas paintings, perfectly blended with their size and shape with the background, obscured precisely that which they represented – small basement windows, flagstones, elements of balustrades or front wall ornaments. Locating these paintings without the map and the photographs would have been difficult, and even with them required good powers of observation. Therefore, the project – a painting one, basically – initially generated a close look at architecture, and only then a close observation of painted pictures. Gilewicz’s intervention did not visually change the architectural environment, and yet that environment now included elements of an identity different from the objects whose appearance they replicated. Even though Gilewicz’s perfect pictures did not lie, they called into question our absolute trust in your eyes’ testimony. The artist demonstrated that painting, even when delusively similar to reality, can inspire a reflection on the very phenomenon of illusion. He took the visual surface off objects with his paintings and then put it on again, thus asking questions about the significance of a painted image of reality. The architectural details were selected and presented by Gilewicz in such a manner that their painted replicas can be seen as utterly representational paintings, as well as, utterly abstract ones. The two seemingly mutually exclusive interpretations seem equally legitimate here.
Intervening with his painting in the fabric of the city, Gilewicz in a way deconstructs it. As part of his work for the Entropia Gallery, he made and placed throughout Wrocław natural-size replicas of real-life details (2006). As a result, some real, non-replicated, objects were seen by the viewers as Gilewicz’s paintings.
In Brooklyn, he found an illegal garbage dump with a view of Manhattan, and noticed in it several flat rectangular objects resembling paintings (2004). He stretched canvas on them and painted on it replicas of the surface of the covered objects. He made a dozen monochromatic paintings that way and placed them all at the garbage dump, arranging them to look as naturally as possible. The exhibition remained in place for several weeks until someone cleaned the area and removed the garbage. They left the paintings, however – did they recognise they were not garbage?
Gilewicz is also the author of series of photographs and he uses photography in his painting projects, but what he does, above all, is testing the limits of painterly illusion. His project Binary Cities: Łodź–Warsaw (the galleries Manhattan and XX1) 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 colour 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.
