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Wojciech Gilewicz’s photographs from the last six years arrange themselves into a cycle that – regardless of the meanings and intentions attributed to them by the author – correspond with the current of theoretical speculation on the sense, idea, and possibility of any depiction. The problem of the hallucinogenic nature of photography, once discussed in detail by Barthes, today becomes also a question of the limits and identity of the icon. That is why the issue cannot be ignored in the analysis of any contemporary artistic practice. But Wojciech Gilewicz’s case is even more interesting because the lability and meandrousness of the concepts distinctive for postmodern aesthetics and semiotics are doubled in his works also on the level of the represented world, or, more precisely, the represented figures. We can guess that, to some degree, they constitute an attempt to reflect on and delineate a demarcation line between the real and the fictional, the public and the private.
Gilewicz, who always portrays himself and juxtaposes his own images made at different times and different places, pulls the viewer into a game of mirror reflections. What is surprising and significant here is that he uses the very much traditional photographic medium rather than employing digital manipulation. All the images are recorded on classic photographic film using the so called graduated filter. So what we have here is a situation where the medium does not distort transparency but rather results in an atomisation, as it were, of the representation. The final image is a multiplicity of choices and mirror reflections.
We are reminded at this point of Velasquez’s famous painting Las Meninas which today has become a metaphor of art and the very idea of representation, while at the same time demonstrating that the mirror can contain everything. That idea was later articulated by photography, and the multiple portraits of Szpakowski, Witkiewicz or Duchamp speak for themselves. Gilewicz adds to this discourse his own corporeality, multiplying it and suspending it in a sphere of potentiality and non-fulfilment. The area between constructs the essence of the event, serving as a kind of quotation marks and a question at the same time. For, let us remember, it is an encounter that will never be consumed. Instead, it will be examined and self-examined. In this sense, the works are extremely topical and important because, willing or not, we all live today in the power of the gaze. It is just the mass media anymore, but we ourselves usurp the right to judge and repress other people’s corporeality and subjectivity, which, supposedly, should fit in with iconic and – generally – cultural standards. Gilewicz actually intensifies this discomfort in his works. Importantly, however, he turns it towards himself. His private exposure becomes for him a point of departure and an (auto)erotic sacrifice he makes in front of himself and in front of the viewer. In this version, rather than becoming a joy of reading, this narcissism obviously causes loneliness and a sense of distance to become doubled. So it is a kind of a relationship of exhaustion that, however, prompts one to try and overcome and reinterpret it. Thence the attempts to change the scenery and the nomadic tropes of this narrative. The encounter and the – let it be – incompleteness of the dialogue conducted by the artist are not just a confrontation with the ‘misery’ of the Other, as the French philosophy of the encounter put it. Here the problem is not exhausted in axiology, which was to be manifested by the face.
What is extremely important in Wojciech Gilewicz’s works is their spatiotemporal context. The locations and props, though not symbolising anything in this series, are not accidental either. These are places where the author made some important personal choices, where he lived or stayed for some time. The pictures show clearly that privacy interferes with, or, spreading, actually appropriates public space. However, in this homogenisation of the real there occurs a split of the persona(e). The figures represented cannot ever physically meet and it is this impossibility that defines their truth. At the same time, it is a truth that does not usurp the right to being the only truth, for all the accounts presented here are – indeed – not of this world. Paradoxically, the encounter is here a lone polyphony of the subject that turned himself into both a model and an object. He is contained in them and constructs his identity, corporeality, gender. They become cultural matrixes and masks, and, most importantly, they are universal motifs and tropes. Every flâneur or voyeur can easily see them. But this will always be a view through the glass, in the company of mirrors…
