French Garden II

As in other works by Dominik Lejman, the artist’s attitude towards painting as seen in the French Garden II is related to his observation of social modes of behaviour and the means of their control. Another interrelated issue is that of observing reality and the digital recording of it. Lejman includes a video projection in his exploration for a personal painting formula, treating the camera as a tool for creating painting archives, hinting, at the same time, at the camera’s role in monitoring society.

The artist set his deliberations in the context of a French garden, which he considered both in the aesthetic, as well as political categories. The image, ascetic in form, presenting an embroidery-like box parterre and referring to one of the parterres of the French garden surrounding the Branicki Palace in Białystok, serves as a screen on which a video presenting a crowd of people is projected. The projection is thus absorbed by the surface of the picture. Such gesture lets Lejman reveal his attitude to painting – the artist does not perceive it merely in categories of a classical painted image but, referring to the phenomenological observations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the art of Paul Cézanne, rather in the context of thinking by means of painting, allowing light and space to speak.

The transformation of an ornamental parterre (a garden) into a painting (image) is not only limited to a subversive interpretation of the modern formula of ”ut pictura hortus” (garden as a picture). The digital image of the crowd overlapping the painting evokes political connotation of this type of landscape architecture. The orderly French-style garden, the model of which was the Versaille of Louis XIV, is identified with nature, tamed and dominated by the human. At the level of power, however, it is associated with enlightened absolutism. The modern aesthetic and political categories in Lejman’s work are consonant with postmodern control of society in the form of elaborate systems of electronic monitoring and surveillance. The image of the crowd, introduced within the framework of the painting, reminiscent of CC TV recordings, does not disrupt the unity of the composition. The figures, shown here en masse and treated as ornamentation, fit very well the metaphorically treated framework of control.

Izabela Kopania