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Wojciech Gilewicz’s project carried into effect specially for the Foksal Gallery combines reality and various manners of representing it: painting and photography. To begin with, the artist placed three white stretchers in the park adjacent to the gallery and fixed the arrangement in a photograph. How he had set out the blank canvases resulted from a series of tests and calculations. Photographed, the stretchers looked like three identical squares arranged in a straight line at an equal distance from the camera. Then Gilewicz painted over the blank canvases re-creating in each exactly what each stretcher had previously blocked the view of. The emergence of the paintings was a process subordinated to the optics of the camera positioned all the time where the artist had taken his first photograph of the white stretchers in the park. Gilewicz acknowledged his images as finished at a point when, looking at them through the camera, he was no longer able to single the painted canvases out against the surroundings. Then the artist took another photograph where the three paintings merge with the real world so ideally as to become indistinguishable. At first glance, what the photograph represents is simply a park section. If it had not been set against the photograph of white stretchers in a landscape, it would have been almost impossible to find the camouflaged paintings. In the end, the artist placed both photographs in the gallery interior, near the window through which the park can be seen. Three equal squares in the very first photograph, in the gallery the three canvases turned into figures in strange irregular shapes and quite different sizes. ‘I wanted to disrupt, not to integrate things,’ Gilewicz insisted. For he had apparently turned a section of reality combined with painting and photography into a strikingly consistent whole. Out of context, the final photograph would be simply one of a section of the park adjacent to the Foksal Gallery. No one would have guessed that the image represents paintings hidden in a landscape. However, what Wojciech Gilewicz did at the exhibition was to denude the illusion of art to the viewer. He uncovered the very procedure of constructing a world of painted make-believe. He thus shows that our reception of the world round us is relative and always depends on this or other type of perspective. The artist creates perfect illusion in which he engages the viewer, and then, in an instant, he shatters the illusion. The ideal squares turn into figures in irregular, ragged shapes, and what the pictures painted in the park represent, does by no means overlap with what the stretchers placed in the same landscape had blocked the view of.
Wojciech Gilewicz had carried all sorts of play on the borderline between reality and photography before. His degree-winning project in Leon Tarasewicz’s studio at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts featured two photographs transferred onto canvas. One represented a landscape in the centre of which the artist had placed a blank stretcher. As in his project for the Foksal Gallery, Wojciech Gilewicz had apparently cut a white hole out of reality. The other photograph showed the landscape complete, for the artist had patched up the white hole by painting over the blank stretcher. The painted counterpart of the reality section had merged with it ideally so that artist’s intervention was almost imperceptible.
Gilewicz conjured up a similar though even more complex arrangement at his exhibition at the Biała Gallery in Lublin in 2000. In the green adjacent to the gallery, the artist put a blank stretcher the size of one of the gallery walls, after which he spent two weeks working on his painting. Meanwhile the weather changed several times: the snow melted and fell again, and the grass was beginning to show. Gilewicz commemorated all these changes on the canvas, by which he made the image take semblance of reality on each successive day. As in his project for the Foksal Gallery, the painting process was coordinated here by the optical properties of the camera. The picture in the Lublin green might have taken infinitely long to emerge, and it might have taken different shapes according to the season. At a certain point, however, the artist must have decided on the conclusion of the creative process and set about transferring the ‘finished’ painting to the gallery. In fact, the final work concealed a wealth of paintings within. It might have as well further evolved.
During his stay in New York in 2004, Wojciech Gilewicz executed painted works merging ideally with urban fabric. The artist covered a section of a scratched wall in the New York subway and the bricked up window recesses of a brick building in Soho with their precise painted replicas. The canvases reproduced with exceeding realism the peeling walls, the leaks, the inscriptions in sprayed paint, and remnants of removed posters. Gilewicz left the resulting images, abstract and representational at the same time, in the urban space for some time. He exposed his canvases to the atmospheric conditions, and he also accepted the risk of exposing them to damage or loss. Yet his interventions with the city’s reality had so ideally adjusted themselves to it as to remain unnoticed. Every day hundreds of people coming face to face with the huge picture installed by Wojciech Gilewicz at Greenpoint Avenue subway station remained quite unaware of the change introduced into their surroundings. Those passing the building in Soho did not even notice the three canvases placed by Gilewicz in the window recesses.
So the artist had gone a step further. In a New York illegal dump heap, he found various flat objects, spanned canvas on their surface and painted over them, reproducing faithfully what was originally beneath. The resulting images were ideal impersonations of the sections of reality chosen by the artist. For over two months, Gilewicz’s paintings were part of the New York panorama with Manhattan in the background. Only the artist knew they were there.
In that same year, on the premises of the Fondation Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris, Wojciech Gilewicz made his painted replicas substitute for the sections of architecture he had selected. He covered a window, a windowsill, parts of the banister, basement windows and even flagstones with their faithful painted copies. Without Gilewicz’s special map, it would have been impossible to discover the paintings concealed in the architecture.
Gino Severini writes that the unquestionable fact is that the three dimensions of ordinary space have never satisfied artists anxious to take possession of reality.1 Wojciech Gilewicz does not confine his work to the three dimensions of painter’s canvas either. Various manners of looking at reality interpenetrate in his works; painting intertwines with photography, and illusion of art blends with reality. In a work created by Gilewicz for the Foksal Gallery, we are looking at a park section chosen by the artist through the lens of painting and photography, and through a real window. By bringing to a clash different images of one and the same reality segment, the artist wants to show the relative quality of our vision of the surrounding world, and demonstrates how the border between the real and the imagined can be blurred.
1 Artyści o sztuce od van Gogha do Picassa [Artists on Art From Van Gogh to Picasso], selected
by Elżbieta
Grabska and Hanna Morawska, Eds, Warsaw, 1977, p. 175.
