WORKS Revitalisations 2 Obelisk Bat Yam 310 East 22nd Street Cuboids The Painters Untitled (gate) In Practice Shanghai Intrude New project Them KMS Zacheta Ivano-Frankivsk Revitalisations The Aporia of Painting Binary City TR Warszawa Galichnik Art Residency Foksal Gallery Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe New York 2004 Unfinished project 1999 - Paintings 2000 - 2002 Seaside Plein-air City - Estate - Studio - Apartment Picture in the Field Biala Gallery Graduation project

by Sabina Sokołowska

 

    Before us, a static theatre of images. Abstract image, realistic image – these categories no longer play any role whatsoever. They seem to have become relative and devoid of meaning.

“I am a painter,” Wojciech Gilewicz says. “I use the classic medium, but I use it in a perverse way. I want my paintings to be invisible and thus contradict the genre as a whole. To contradict it, on the one hand, while, on the other, showing its triumph. What interests me the most in what I do is arriving at the situation when something is at the two opposite ends of the value scale at the same time, e.g. a painting that represents a certain specific fragment of reality is removed from this reality and becomes an abstract painting.”1

    He often presents his work beyond the confines of a gallery. He waits quietly until the city first absorbs his paintings and then, like the ocean, tosses them onto the shore like the wreckage of a ship. The audience at a Gilewicz show is transformed into treasure hunters, seeking the imitation hoardings and scraps of architecture which make up the artist’s composition in urban space. His painting melds so perfectly with its architectural settings that his exhibition audiences have had to wander through Paris, Wrocław, Sanok and New York armed with a map to help them locate his pictures. The uninitiated passed the paintings by, unheeding. The illusion was so powerful that it created an invisible work.

    He has consciously given up the notion of the painting-as-fetish; it is as if he writes off his work. “No signature or trade-marking. [...],” Ad Reinhardt wrote. “One should never let the influence of devil demons gain control of the brush.” 2

    However, everything has its price. With Gilewicz, the destruction of his work is written into its very perception. Paintings, varnished many times over, walked on, or inadvertently thrown away. Some of them destroyed. Several of them stolen. Not to mention bowing beneath the ravages of wind and rain. Gilewicz applied his artist’s skills to ‘fixing up’ urban plant holders and window recesses and to offering a series of abstract paintings on a rubbish dump in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, across the Hudson, the art dealers of Manhattan were pushing that very same type of ‘rubbish’. Changing the context in which the work is set alters our way of looking at it; in the world of art, a great many things are relative and it is to this that Gilewicz wants to sensitise us.

    Art is ‘heightened illusion’, whereas we, lost in virtual reality, live out our lives among ‘hyperbolic mirrors’. A point of no return. The watching of the world through screens by the thousandfold.

    In his exhibition at the Foksal, Gilewicz turns toward the abstract. It is a tribute to an autonomous world of art. In memory of Malewicz’s squares, the constructivists’ exhibitions, Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings, Anselm Kiefer’s charred ‘pictures’… appearance devoid of all reference to reality…

    However, we cannot be certain as to whether or not the autonomous world of art continues to exist at all. We cannot be certain if it ever did. The ease with which an abstract painting becomes a picture at once hyperrealistic and a subversive impersonation of reality is startling. And this is precisely the situation that Gilewicz offers us; pictures previously invisible, lost in an industrial landscape, becoming perceptible only when exhibited in a gallery. Illusive trompe l’oeil transmuting into non-representational painting.

    It is perfection of artistic technique which permits such illusive sleight of hand. The artist takes the world into his possession for a brief moment. He and the work become invisible. Gilewicz startles the viewer, playing an unceasing game with his perception.

    Here at the Foksal, he unites wholly new paintings, including one from the New York project never before shown, with previously exhibited works, works which formed part of various undertakings, functioning in contexts beyond the painterly. Pictures from his urban space projects carried out in Warsaw and Łódź (Miasto Binarne / The Binary City, 2006) and Sanok (Rewitalizacje / Revitalisation, 2007) mingle with decorative painted elements executed for the Ivano-Franivsk Museum of Art in Ukraine (2007), paintings created for Foundation Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris and for the KMS Zachęta project (2007).

    Like sunken treasure. Out of time, and deprived of their previous context, they take on new meanings. Some expressive, others caught in the cool spirit of geometric abstraction. There is also a black monochrome in the spirit of the informel; strange, painterly material, like a hardened fragment of volcanic magma, caught and bound like a snapshot in the immobility of the painter’s lens.

    For Gilewicz, to create is to incessantly step beyond the boundaries of the existing order. It is the deconstruction of the frames within which we have become accustomed to viewing art, and, in particular, painting. For painting is a spectacle, making demands of its audience. “Our admiration for painting results from a long process of adaptation that has taken place over centuries and for reasons that often have nothing to do with art or the mind. Painting created its receiver. It is basically a conventional relationship.”3

    Gilewicz breaks the confines of established ritual. There are no seductively luminous colours, he gives us no ‘refined painterly texture’. Neither does his exhibition follow the Readymade route, with artefacts along the lines of Duchamp’s Bottle Rack. His painted picture-objects, objects which previously played the part of window embrasure or paving stone, are undoubtedly the fruit of great effort on his part. In forging the formally inept street daubing of a Warsaw graffitist, he skilfully balances on the tightrope border with kitsch.

    Wojciech Gilewicz fixes his gaze intently and obsessively on a wall. But the material remains impenetrable and the wall unbreakable. What power is it that commands artists to absorb reality through their senses, since what we are discussing is the relationship between the picture and the world?

    The gallery setting, with none of the simulation which is so characteristic of Gilewicz’s work, deprives illusion of its strength. The paintings no longer pretend; they are, quite simply, paintings. Monochromatic images dominate, pictures in muted tones, overwhelming with their silent ‘presence’, absorbing the very light itself.

    The abstract has become deconstruction, annihilating illusion in painting for the sake of an autonomous work. A painting no longer has to reproduce reality; it has become reality itself. “The abstraction of our world is now a given,” wrote Baudrillard, “it has been for some time, and all the art forms of an indifferent world carry the same stigma of indifference.”4

    Gilewicz himself says: “The abstract can be incomprehensible, metaphysical and hermetic. I wanted to demonstrate that it can be found everywhere. And in that, possibly cynical, sense, an incomprehensible theory could be introduced to paving stones and bits of walls… But then it may well turn out that reality itself is very metaphysical.”5

    For art is both the sublimation of surrounding reality and an immanent to it. Communing with Wojciech Gilewicz’s work, one may well come away with the impression that he will never cease to take the world as the painter’s subject. The tensility in his art is perceptible, it is unceasing, an attention and sensitivity to every detail which borders on the obsessive.

    Essentially, to Gilewicz, reality is an all-embracing image. An image which incessantly undergoes metamorphoses and will never run dry. In transposing the picture into the surrounding reality, and in returning once again to pure abstract painting, he turns our attention toward the perpetually intertwining of these worlds.

    Nonetheless, with the act of painting, he cuts himself off from every one of the theories. All that matters is the painting. And nothing else.

 

 

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