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Both photographs and painting series by Wojciech Gilewicz are deeply embedded in real images, although they feature situations that seemingly could never occur. Why? Because they constitute a deliberate act in their very essence. Its formula includes the artist’s individual and therefore unique approach to the represented or created mimicry. The painting project carried out over the period of eight months in the centre of Wrocław was exactly such an attempt at taming and naming the urban reality adopted for the sake of painting. To begin with, let us try and look at previous projects in order to discover the consequences of this approach.
By presenting dynamic interiors and arranged situations, the series Them, developed since 2002, vested the represented reality with an error – the relations between the models in the photographs could never come into being, since each of them constituted the artist’s faithful self-portrait. The experience of everyday life, expressed through reading a book, talking in the bathroom or other activities performed by two people at home, was transformed into an erotic dialogue with oneself.
It is in a different manner that Gilewicz conducts the reality hoax in his painting projects. He filled the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok with faithful representations of the items of spatial organisation, such as doors or windows. At the Foksal Gallery he displayed paintings that had previously represented fragments of a park’s landscape faithfully enough to conceal the real objects. Finally, at the exhibition for the Deutsch de la Meurthe in Paris, his canvases blended with the park surrounding the gallery, covering trash bins and pavement flagstones. In Paris, the gallery presentation featuring the photo coverage of the painting-based transformations of the environment was accompanied by a leaflet-map indicating exhibition venues in the natural surroundings. Thus Gilewicz turned once again to the mystifying function of art, reserving the possibility to explain it at the same time. His realism of representation was proved through a complete fusion of the paintings with the represented objects. The results of the artistic activity were discovered by surprise. That introduced an unpleasant (or maybe actually pleasant) feeling on the part of the audience that they may be ‘exposed’ to art virtually everywhere. One would feel tempted to evoke the old cliché that an artist is rather not the one who sees better, but the one who sees more.
Against the background of these activities, the project prepared for the Entropia Gallery in Wrocław seems to be the most consistent interference of such representations in the real image of the city. The project was composed of two interlinked parts. The first consisted of a faithful representation on canvas of the urban elements found in the vicinity of the Market Square in Wrocław, such as an electric meter box covered with advertisements, water stained panel at an entrance to a building or a single pavement flagstone. Faithful, one-to-one copies of these elements, painted in oil in the autumn of 2006 were located in places which they represented – real objects disappeared under painted dummies. The process of painting and covering particular places with canvases was registered and edited in video form by Mariusz Jodko. This documentation, included within the project, was presented during the exhibition opening at Entropia, but remained on display through the entire project time span upon request of the audience. The following stage involved installing twelve canvases in places that were thus represented and covered at the same time. During the eight months, their structure was exposed to the impact of natural, urban factors. Apart from the video coverage, the gallery also offered maps with hand-written descriptions of venues where Gilewicz had installed his paintings. This stage seems more interesting in terms of the idea of representing reality and creating urban mimicry. The paintings were left on their own – like unexposed photo negatives – in order to partly negate the artist’s need to reconstruct or create the cityscape. The results of this action were of a various character. The weather conditions as well as pollution and the interference of passers-by, i.e. natural urban phenomena, had a significant impact on the structure of these works. Gilewicz’s paintings were covered with posters, stepped and cycled on, soiled. Some of them, like the one installed on a flagstone, ended up in tatters. Several were stolen. One of them, taken away before winter, reappeared in the same place in spring with a note behind the frame informing that it had been taken for conservation by the Transparente group. Furthermore, the owners of Entropia were monitoring the state of the paintings through the entire project time span. Thus a real-time recording of the street’s impact on art emerged. Apart from the obvious damage, some canvases acquired very interesting characteristics due to exposure to dirt. At the beginning of June, Mariusz Jodko carried out a video recording of the process of painting removal conducted by Gilewicz. On the 26th of June 2007, the exhibition ‘The Aporia of Painting’ was opened at Entropia, which presented the impact of more than half a year of artistic activity, time and circumstances on the canvases – the essence of the real contained in nothing more than several scraps of works of art, ‘loaned’ to reality for a specific period of time. Another important part of the exhibition featured the documentation by Mariusz Jodko – videos and photographs shot during the project. Thus the objects of art, both abstract and evoking Matter Painting, therefore even more realistic, returned into the gallery environment, which guarantees safety and comfort.
It would be unfair to perceive Gilewicz’s paintings solely in the context of the intellectual game that the artist plays with the audience. Contemplation of the surrounding space, examination of its every aspect without imposing an individual manner of perception as well as observation of distortion and hidden paradoxes results in elaborate, often dynamic accounts of the given sites. The exhibition and Gilewicz’s approach to canvas evokes a Buddhist consent to unintellectual brushwork as well as something more primeval, deprived of direct bonds with culture. It is quite paradoxical a situation, since the cityscape, which the artist chooses with full awareness of abundance of cultural contexts, appears here as his natural environment. The environment which, despite being marked for human activity, slips away from him during an instant of oblivion - when there is no reaction to the artist’s own product. This very personal and introvert settling accounts with layers of culture, with almost no traces on its tissue, enhances the meaning of culture through embedding the research in reality.
The œuvre of Gilewicz is dominated by two, seemingly contradictory tendencies: expressing his position as a not entirely objective artistic figure by means of the photographs as well as letting the process of artistic creation loose in the paintings, which reduces this figure to the level of an attentive observer, a guardian, a tool and a medium. With no claims to leaving his signature on the reverse of the canvas. These tendencies are only seemingly contradictory, since they always lead beyond an explanation of notions connected with the act of artistic creation.
