Rafal Bujnowski
19 May - 19 Jun 2007
RAFAL BUJNOWSKI
Johnen + Schöttle gallery is showing works by Rafal Bujnowski from his most recent production. The exhibition comprises oil painting, charcoal drawings, a video sculpture and new sculptural objects.
With his new works Rafal Bujnowski is continuing his investigation of the correlation between the autonomy of the artwork as an object and its representation of an image. As usually in his works Bujnowski does apply simple production processes and creates kind of a visual instruction manual for the creation of the pieces which always come as series. He thus conceptualises his artistic approach to the material facts of the artwork and denounces any idea of individual style.
This becomes clear in a series of paintings that do consist of a squared canvas having broad brush strokes in different intensity and showing a transparent curtain. Behind these curtains one is able to identify a person or the window which is covered by the curtain. Although it is however impossible to completely retreat from perceiving the work as a representation the recognition of how it is made becomes indispensable for the perception of the image. In this respect it is crucial for the understanding of the works by Rafal Bujnowski that they theoretically could be done also by anybody else than the artist himself. Correspondingly he is exhibiting also a series of small paintings of different colour patterns, having always the same shape but being done in different colour combinations. The paintings are done in a rough way and the image that might be detected is also a very simple one; it doesn’t appear in any reasonable figurative context and is actually rather absurd as representation.
Even more abstract are the cosmic paintings – roundly shaped canvasses covered by massive bundles of painted straight lines – and the paintings showing discs of different sizes and partly covering each other. While the charcoal drawings of miners make use of the associative identification of the material with the subject of the image – faces of coal miners covered by dust of coal – in order to bring forward the viewer’s recognition of the work’s constitutive aspects the paintings do rely completely on their imaginative independence born out of the characteristics inherent to their material.
The same strategy is applied to the stained glass windows Rafal Bujnowski is showing as autonomous sculptural objects. He makes use of old windows with broken glass that he found on demolition sites and he had the shapes of glass stained by a professional workshop. The cracks do not follow any predetermined pattern, their course did occur accidentally and their conversion to an artwork is transferred to an anonymous person. Additionally it is remarkable for Rafal Bujnowski’s approach that he applies a technique that is normally used as a decorative element in representative architecture to a residue containing no artistic value in itself. The distraction from the position of the creator becomes even more extreme when Rafal Bujnowksi inserted a USB-stick into a concrete cube of remarkable size. He is contrasting the dimensions of the container and its raw material with the dimensions and the consistency of the virtual data. Beyond the question where actually the visual contents of the work are contained, in the concrete cube? the USB-stick? they do become visible only when connected to a notebook. This can happen – and is supposed to happen – independently from the artists initiative and be executed by any user who wishes to do so. The moment of completion of the work turns indeterminable and the work itself does become autonomous.
Johnen + Schöttle gallery is showing works by Rafal Bujnowski from his most recent production. The exhibition comprises oil painting, charcoal drawings, a video sculpture and new sculptural objects.
With his new works Rafal Bujnowski is continuing his investigation of the correlation between the autonomy of the artwork as an object and its representation of an image. As usually in his works Bujnowski does apply simple production processes and creates kind of a visual instruction manual for the creation of the pieces which always come as series. He thus conceptualises his artistic approach to the material facts of the artwork and denounces any idea of individual style.
This becomes clear in a series of paintings that do consist of a squared canvas having broad brush strokes in different intensity and showing a transparent curtain. Behind these curtains one is able to identify a person or the window which is covered by the curtain. Although it is however impossible to completely retreat from perceiving the work as a representation the recognition of how it is made becomes indispensable for the perception of the image. In this respect it is crucial for the understanding of the works by Rafal Bujnowski that they theoretically could be done also by anybody else than the artist himself. Correspondingly he is exhibiting also a series of small paintings of different colour patterns, having always the same shape but being done in different colour combinations. The paintings are done in a rough way and the image that might be detected is also a very simple one; it doesn’t appear in any reasonable figurative context and is actually rather absurd as representation.
Even more abstract are the cosmic paintings – roundly shaped canvasses covered by massive bundles of painted straight lines – and the paintings showing discs of different sizes and partly covering each other. While the charcoal drawings of miners make use of the associative identification of the material with the subject of the image – faces of coal miners covered by dust of coal – in order to bring forward the viewer’s recognition of the work’s constitutive aspects the paintings do rely completely on their imaginative independence born out of the characteristics inherent to their material.
The same strategy is applied to the stained glass windows Rafal Bujnowski is showing as autonomous sculptural objects. He makes use of old windows with broken glass that he found on demolition sites and he had the shapes of glass stained by a professional workshop. The cracks do not follow any predetermined pattern, their course did occur accidentally and their conversion to an artwork is transferred to an anonymous person. Additionally it is remarkable for Rafal Bujnowski’s approach that he applies a technique that is normally used as a decorative element in representative architecture to a residue containing no artistic value in itself. The distraction from the position of the creator becomes even more extreme when Rafal Bujnowksi inserted a USB-stick into a concrete cube of remarkable size. He is contrasting the dimensions of the container and its raw material with the dimensions and the consistency of the virtual data. Beyond the question where actually the visual contents of the work are contained, in the concrete cube? the USB-stick? they do become visible only when connected to a notebook. This can happen – and is supposed to happen – independently from the artists initiative and be executed by any user who wishes to do so. The moment of completion of the work turns indeterminable and the work itself does become autonomous.