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An interesting cognitive situation was prepared by Wojciech Gilewicz in September 2004 for the viewers of his most recent work at Foundation Deutsch de la Muerthe, on Paris’s university campus. In one of the rooms, the viewers found a simple map and several photographs suggesting that, in the park and on the walls of the buildings that had passed on their way here, the artist had placed his painting objects. The viewers could now take a walk around the area to find out that in their immediate surroundings details had been placed that are not real in the common sense of the word but rather painterly replicas of the originals. Moreover, the illusionistic oil-on-canvas paintings, fit precisely, with their shape and size, into the scenery, covered exactly that which they represented – e.g. small basement windows, flagstones, elements of railings or of building façades. Finding these pictures without the map and the photos would have been very difficult, and even with them required a keen sense of observation. The, basically, painting project generated, firstly, a very close contact with architecture, and only then a closer contact with the works of painting.
Gilewicz’s intervention hardly changed the architectonic environment in visual terms, and yet that environment now contained new elements, of an identity sharply different from the objects whose appearance it replicated. The experience of that fact made us aware anew that we treat things differently depending on whether we think what we are viewing is architecture or painting. Sometimes we view architecture like painting, usually, however, we perceive its objects as real in a stronger sense even that our own transient existence. So while Gilewicz’s perfectionist, ‘from nature’, paintings didn’t lie, the manner in which they were used challenged our confidence that what we see is real. It was a manifestation of the paradoxical capabilities of painting which, even when deluding us with a semblance of reality, can inspire reflection on the very phenomenon of illusion.
Gilewicz not only painted a series of pictures. An integral part of his action was to present them in a special manner (outside the space of the art gallery), to, so to say, ex-hibit them. In biology, habitus means the set of properties constituting the appearance (of an animal, for instance), so ex-hibiting can be construed to mean presenting (displaying) a certain set of properties of, in this case, painting. Gilewicz was not decorating architecture by combining it with painting. Instead, he demonstrated that by entering with painted pictures into the realm of architecture you were able to say something meaningful and surprising about painting. He took the visual surface off objects and put it on again. He thus asked a question about the meaning of the painterly image of reality.
And what are Gilewicz paintings now that they have been separated from the architectural whole that originally co-created their meaning? What do they mean now? We are having to do with another paradox here. The architectural details had been selected and presented by the artist in such a manner that their painterly replicas could equally be seen as perfectly representational and as completely abstract. The two seemingly opposite ways of interpreting paintings seemed utterly equivalent here. Depending on the attitude we adopt, we will see different things in the paintings. But there is also a third possibility: using the legend, that is, the description provided on the map, and attributing the paintings to the given fragment of the map of Paris, or the city’s history or mythology.
Gilewicz has used painting to intervene in the urban tissue in other places as well. He has always combined respectable painting skills with a seemingly simple, but pertinent and consistent, concept. In this regard, he is a great example of building on the experience gained during studies in academies as different as those in Poznań and in Warsaw. In the spring of 2000, during a presentation in Galeria Biała, Gilewicz for two weeks every day repainted a picture placed in park outside the gallery so that, viewed from the gallery’s windows, it blended perfectly with the scenery as it changed its appearance due to changing weather conditions. Gilewicz was also the precursor in Poland of the housing estate panorama in his painting-and-photography work City-Estate-Studio-Apartment (Laboratorium CSW, Warsaw 2001). He also daringly revived the experience of photorealistic painting by installing at the Arsenał in Białystok a series of works representing doors.
Two of Gilewicz’s 2004 actions partly correspond with the Paris show. Both were carried out outside the gallery, in the open urban space of New York City.
First, a street in Soho, a wall covered with rather typical graffiti writings running across the wall and the niches of bricked up windows, some torn off posters, stains. The artist selected three fragments of this recording of urban events, clearly isolated by the window niches, photographed them, and then made faithful 1:1 copies of them on canvas. This took him some two months. During that time, unexpectedly for him, the wall was, for some reason, partly cleaned, the graffiti removed (life goes on quickly). Seeing this as a challenge for himself, the artist placed in the niches, empty now, his replicas of the wall’s former condition. For a casual observer, the whole thing looked quire ordinarily: the wall had been cleaned but the niches were left untouched. But for the sharp-witted street people operating in the area, the situation could be at least puzzling. The exhibition, not arranged with the landlord at all, for several days pleased the eye of those initiated in the project (though not necessarily in the strategies of contemporary art). Gilewicz’s action evoked, as it were, the memory of architecture’s trivial experiences. Risking the loss of his time-consuming works, the artist for a moment reversed the flow of time. That is what painterly photorealism was able to achieve.
Second, an unfrequented stretch of a street in Brooklyn, the place of an illegal garbage dump, but with a view of Manhattan in the background. Here, objects signify that they are redundant, picturesquely heaped – ‘still civilisation’, like formerly ‘still life’. There is no shortage of flat, rectangular objects that could bring paintings to mind – and if they were paintings? And what if we replace them with paintings? Canvas was stretched on the surfaces and replicas of those surfaces were painted on it. A dozen usually monochromatic pictures were made this way and were then brought to the garbage dump and placed so as to look as natural as possible. In that setting, in the urban context, it wasn’t easy to look at them as just paintings but rather the great picture they formed with their surroundings. The ‘show’ remained in place for several weeks. Until someone brought heavy equipment and took the garbage away. Surprisingly, they left the paintings in place, did they recognise them as paintings? Did they leave them there for further scrutiny or to be used later? Painting’s potential continues to surprise us
