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Realistic painting is once again beginning to look fresh and to propose interesting intellectual situations. Recent works by Wojciech Gilewicz present a truly radical realism, where each of the paintings, although entirely devoid of a plot, has a visual impact of a loud, short, cracking sound, followed by a long echo vibrating through the gallery space. These elements of reality evoked by painting are almost more real than we are, the viewers. Despite the fact that there is no doubt that this is a realism based on photography, such definition seems insufficient in this case; it requires supplementary information and a continuation of observations and reflecting upon. A strange question in the context of such a realistic painting arises: what do we see on the picture? Of course, we see a door – but how do we see it? On the one hand, the size of the painting suggests that it reflects the subject in a one to one scale; on the other, there is no doubt that we are dealing with artistic replicas of the door as we know that what is on the canvas presents something extraordinarily similar to a door but a door it is not. We finally conclude that the subject of this representative painting are photographs which present doors. It is a little like a story within a story, like a box – structured novel. The photograph of the object is not the basis for its realistic reconstruction in painting but it is in itself the object here presented.
Three very similar levels overlap here: that of painting, photography and the object photographed. We know that the photo records reality differently than our eyes. It is the observing of this difference that makes it possible for us to recognise what the painting presented by Gilewicz presents. It does not mean, however, that the whole series of works could be brought down to a ”visual analysis of the photographic code of the medium”. We are dealing here with something less abstract, not a laboratory experiment. It is more important to see in this realisation a record of a particular experience which is composed of a series of stages.
First, there is the journey, wandering through the streets of a strange town, taking pictures of the details observed, studying the photos taken, then again recording the surrounding with the bare eye and a camera lens. From this moment on the photographs begin to live lives of their own; they are items collected during the journey – like new sunglasses, bus tickets, an album, a bag or a book. All of these things are to remind us of something, refer us to what was seen. Some are worth looking at later, analysing; some are worth being painted. We could try to enlarge the photograph of the door observed, a door which has been somewhat forgotten, to its natural size. What would be the difference between the photograph and a perfectly painted picture? First of all, it would differ as to the duration of its creation. It only takes a split second to take a photograph but it requires several weeks to paint a picture from it. All the details that were mechanically registered by the camera had to pass through the consciousness and the hand of the author. It is the time of taming the image, writing it in oneself; it will then be also available to others. We are, therefore, dealing here with a profound experience of a selected concrete matter – a photograph, which is a concrete matter taken from one’s own experience. The unquestioned technical skill of the painter is really a smoke screen here. Without it, however, it would be very difficult to play the game.
There is one more important component of the game proposed by the art of Wojciech Gilewicz. He made photographs the subject of his painting and by the scale and way of exhibiting, he caused his paintings to be objects which are “in their right places” in the gallery space. Despite the overlapping of the two codes of representation (that of photography and that of painting), the third code, expressed by the door itself, is still clearly visible. Its expression – by separating the door from the surrounding, by the separation caused by the photograph – is a record of unknown social micro-events on the architectural details. These planes, separating the two spaces of one world, register the continuous battle of the active exterior and the stubborn existence of the door itself. The door covers something, directing at the same time one’s attention to the existence of the sphere hidden from the eye.
The artistic photorealism has already had its glory days, it was the true artistic attraction of the early 1970’s, developing in parallel to the analytical art of the media. Ten years later it was already a classical art and it could have been thought that all the issues to which it referred had already been posed, solved and sold. Two years ago, when once more reading the fascinating book by Ewa Kuryluk, finished in 1976, Hyperrealism – New Realism, I was under the impression that this art trend is again becoming needed. It is becoming current and there arise new possibilities for it to capture the current reality, overflowing by the autonomising media presentations.
