Gallery 2
22.05-18.06.2000

Dominik Lejman
"Luxury of Survival"

Exhibition opening 21.05, 6 p.m.

INTRODUCTION
A Tax on Luxury

The survival of our hybrid, temporary existence is a luxury. The luxury of survival is a result of exertion, of reshaping the environment to shelter oneself from the lethal world around us.

TORSO - painting, acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100, video projection. The projection shows the narrowly framed back of a seated person, which is slightly moving. The shape of the projected figure corresponds to the light form in the picture (comp. Air Bag)

Luxury takes shape in the safe cocoon of one’s cosy, private space, or of clothing, of social relationships and internal peace. The luxury of survival is not for everybody, everywhere and eternity. If you have the pleasure of living in the right place at the right time and are lucky enough to be able to enjoy this, you might be interested in Dominik Lejman and his work. It addresses, among others, the tax on this luxury. Lejman chooses a variant of reality to address this, where the comfort of survival is of the highest quality. It is a perfectly designed universe; a universe of safe, fast-moving vehicles equipped with air-bags, flyovers, design shop ergonomics, clearly sign-posted public places, functional offices and flats, social security and convenient loans. It is a universe of functional aesthetics. It is a world, which you already inhabit, will in the future or, at the very least, wish to one day.

Dominik Lejman does not criticise this world. He portrays some fragments of reality, which form spectacles in this realm. He portrays silence, which reigns here - one cannot be protected and yet, simultaneously be on the outside too. The artist believes that the universe constructed by our imagination is a cocoon, which builds a transparent but hermetic curtain between us and reality. “Captivity” is a serious word, “alienation” is a more appropriate one here; it is not exactly imprisonment but rather a comfortable environment to survive in. In fact, alienation is the currency exacted to pay the tax on the luxury of survival - the world which we are building around us begins to enclose us.

The majority of Lejman’s work has been made in the context of traditional painting. It is more appropriate to say that it functions ‘in the context’ than to state it is just painting itself, as there are some important elements which make it different from painting as is generally understood by the term. Lejman’s works neither conform to the Renaissance model of “painting as a window”, nor to the modern formula of painting as an autonomous art object.

MORPHING DISC (MORFUJACY DYSK), painting, acrylic and blood on canvas, 120 x130 and computer generated video projection (projected on to the surface of the painting). A video represents a figure seen in profile

I would rather call them ‘places’, where an action created by the artist takes place, and where the role of the viewer is also fundamentally complicit.

In 1998 Lejman began a series of works, in which he combined traditional acrylic painting on canvas with video projections of the human form. The paintings themselves are abstract, but a painted form - a kind of ‘trace’ of the projected image - outlines the video images, which are largely of the artist himself.

This kind of intervention adds a dimension of movement to the space of painting - the element, which by definition is absent from the medium of painting. However, Lejman’s intention is by no means to make the painting a screen for video projection. Nor is it to interject the medium of painting (itself now in a permanent state of crisis) by imposing on it the passion of modern culture - moving images - even if this interpretation is unavoidable in most analysis of Lejman’s work. The artist’s intention is to build a piece of multiple surfaces, in terms of space, but also in terms of time. Dominik blurs the border between the material of both mediums. The projections take place in full, preferably natural light. As a result, the film intermingles with the paint as the moving pictures seem to be located somewhere under the surface of the canvas.

The video images are as if incorporated into the canvas. The painting becomes a space where the projected protagonists come to life. Thus, the painted object becomes a multi-layered area of mediation between various orders of representation and reality. The participants of these ‘negotiations’ are: the timeless painted space, the video space and its time-based frame as well as the viewer’s own gaze and participation. Their mutual impact is clearly visible particularly in Lejman’s Conditioned Discretion. Here a camera registers the viewer and transmits it in real time onto the surface of the painting and there confronts it with a second projection of another person.

A discourse between the viewer and the work, or in other words, a relation between the subject and the object of the gaze, plays a significant role in these ‘enlivened’ pictures. In Lejman’s work the relationship gets blurred because his dimension of time has been incorporated in to the scope of a timeless painting, which happens thanks to video - a medium, which has this ability. The viewer experiences the time of the work and therefore is being drawn by its reality. However, Lejman has never offered full access to his ‘places’. He plays on the dialectics of the accessible and the concealed. The viewer is not able to control the presented reality with his/her senses, as is the case with traditional painting - fully given over to our gaze.

Where control ends participation begins. The layered construct of Lejman’s works, where the viewer and his/her gaze plays an important role as one of the layers is characteristic in all of Lejman’s works in the Luxury of Survival exhibition: both in the ‘incorporated’ paintings and in the space installations (for example; Intel Inside or Consecration). His strategy engages the viewer in a reflection on the contemporary un/natural environment. Through constructed places, spaces and personas Lejman portrays existence in a world which we ourselves have literally created. Nothing lies beyond this world - a world characterised by aesthetics and safety, but on the other hand a repressed feeling of captivity. It resembles painting’s surfaces - cool, minimal but, due to their beauty, attractive, where human beings live in the pale cocoons of ‘air-bags’. One may notice claustrophobia lurking in the visually attractive areas of his work. But claustrophobia maybe a tax on the luxury of survival.

Stach Szablowski
translation: Urszula Sniegowska

Dominik Lejman born in Gdansk, 1969.
He finished the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk and the Royal College of Art in London.