INTERFACE

REVIEW

Rafal Bujnowski

Norwich Gallery, Norwich
9 March – 22 April

Reviewed by: Stephanie Douet

These are paintings – but only just. The exhibition as arranged by the painter looks a little cramped and dull, but when you look at the excellent accompanying catalogue you get an overwhelming impression of wide-ranging speculation and a torrent of witty and stimulating ideas.

The paintings read from left to right on an insistent eye line as though they were the exposition of a system or statement, and are a reminder that however conceptual the work, you are still looking at images presented through an ancient medium involving a welter of assumptions, premises and rules. Beginning on the left there is a group of hand-painted objects – a video, a plank, a remote control, a Pope (familiar in Poland) – which he has painted just as much as is needed to indicate what they are. The deed of painting an object on a 1:1 scale only as itself marks what a tiny movement it is from reality to representation. There exist between eighteen and fifty of each item; by hand-painting in such quantities the singular act of authorship is debased, specially as he swaps and gives away lots of his work.

Round the corner is a homely clump of black and white paintings of photographs of various sizes taken from his family album. They are “both more than, less than and something other than real,”¹ as though by being put in then taken back from a family album they have been personalised and re-made by hand. You might expect that here Bujnowski would use a neutral painting style like Opie or Caulfield to make his games dispassionate and objective, but his style intrudes enough to convey the idea of Realism with a briskly soupy yet slightly airbrushed touch. He indulges himself a little in the pleasure of paint, confident of the conceptual strength of his quest while enjoying the sensual act. It is ‘school dinners’ brushwork rather than gourmet, more like a visual version of Skiffle (music played on pots and pans which at any moment will go back to the kitchen).

Bujnowski uses painting to explore the various things that painting is and isn’t. Like Creed, whose work has just to drop off the mantelpiece to stop being art, he patrols the art/life perimeter wall. There are paintings that have just stopped being photographs, and stains that could be paintings if someone had consciously intended them to be. There are paintings that were begun, but thought better of, and are halfway back to being raw canvas; and ‘Unsuccessful Paintings’ recalling both that art is an unending series of decisions, and also the more practical reminder of the world being full of abandoned canvases. There are two large dirty trompe-l’oeil paintings that pretend to be parts of studio walls with fake photos, grubby marks and tape – does that mean the studio wall itself is a painting because it’s in a studio?

There is a video of the artist’s hand painting buildings at sunset, painting over and over until night fills the canvas, balancing on the edge of creation and destruction, driving on through the point at which a painting is still a painting and not a nothing – or has it become a black painting?

Bujnowski “has a feeling for the reflexive growing points in painting that have not yet taken shape, but that already exist in painting’s genetic code”². Certainly the sight of an artist running his creative curiosity at speed is exciting, as though he had squeezed through a crack in the rock face and discovered Petra.

¹, ² Anna Maria Potochka, ‘Painting isn’t what it used to be’ in Bujnowski – Painting, Bunkier Sztuki, 2005.

Writer detail:
Stephanie Douet is an artist.

Venue detail:
Norwich Gallery
Norwich School of Art and Design, St George Street, Norwich NR3 1BB

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