Dominik Lejman’s art achieves a peculiar translocation between the cinema’s black box and the gallery’s white cube. In his works, painterly, architectural, and cinematic qualities enter into a mutual conversation and exchange. Lejman often explores and exploits that awkward moment of self-awareness in a theatre when the performance or film is over, referring to the “theatre room with lights on”. This phenomenon is often combined with the artist’s disorientation of the viewer through incorporation of the latter’s image within the work – often boggling the mind even further by playing with the child’s perspective that Lejman suspects is imposed on every adult’s visual perception. Time-delay, surveillance of the viewer as a part of the work, staging and perspective are all utilized by the artist in the
projected layers of his paintings, often questioning the ethical and political strategies of representation. YO LO VI (from Goya’s Inquisition), Black Square with Juggler, and A Little Quiet Room are just three of the mind-bending pieces on display in this exhibition of new works by this world-renowned contemporary artist from Gdynia, Poland.
“I have started to think about how an adult is put into the position of a child by means of scale in our innate as well as socially imposed “vision machine“. It is not only a question of perceving an image, but the sense of our own dimensions in front of it – our optics are so often infantilized by monumental representation. We grow up, but that does not necesserily affect our perspective – that window through which the world is presented to us.“ – Dominik Lejman
