|
|
by Wiesław Borowski
Wojciech Gilewicz looks through a gallery window at a desolate park barely coming back to life after the snow has disappeared. Quite a common view: boughs and branches, with a fence and buildings in the background, and a big log of a once overturned oak lying rotten on the lawn that has not grown again yet after the winter. The painter chooses a segment of the horizon from the view and focuses his attention on it. From then on, he is interested in just three points on the line of the horizon. He wants to paint three pictures whose borders and motifs have revealed themselves so to say unaided in the three marked positions. He also wants to show – in a photograph – the whole view, with the painted pictures turned invisible. Invisible does not mean superfluous.
Wojciech Gilewicz’s project is unconventional and simple at the same time. The landscape fascinates him not because of its beauty and his intention to paint a fine picture. Quite unlike we see it usually, is the manner the artist approaches the landscape and painting as such. In a novel way he wants to pay his respects both to nature, and, in reference to it, to the painter’s task.
As the starting point, there were three blank canvases placed in the park at the chosen sites. Their shape and size came as a result of reiterated tests and calculations aiming at merging the canvas with the landscape to a highest degree possible. The painting process as such, continuing for many days, unveiled intriguing and inspiring paradoxes.The painter paints the landscape section veiled from his view by the unpainted painting, ‘from nature’. Once painted, the canvas initially blocking the view begins to impersonate it but, while merging with the view or rather substituting for it, the canvas vanishes from view: the image is invalidated. This can be seen in the photograph.
Also paradoxical are the pictures when separated from the context of nature they are transferred to the gallery. Their shape and appearance diverge far from the image of nature they have so impeccably and at the same time so illusively represented or pretended to be. Yet they are an unquestionable and telling evidence of the painting process; they are also an essential, autonomous effect of it.
