Zug. St. Michael

Rafał Bujnowski’s work, Zug. St. Michael, is part of a series of intentionally similar pieces under the common title Zmierzch [Twilight]. It is composed of a textured black painting (with touches of white seeping through) and a video recording of the gradual painting over of a black and white landscape of the Swiss town of Zug, with its familiar St Michael’s Church tower. The work can be read literally as a representation of dusk approaching, but it can also be seen as expressly self-thematic: the process of painting is just as important as the gradual annihilation of the landscape. The monochromatic canvas and the film showing its creation are mutually complementary and comment on the issue of representation, painting conventions, and the artist’s decisions conditioning the shape and character of the picture.

Deliberations on the notions of painting and image are the main motifs in the artist’s work and, to an effect, serve as the common denominator in his different pieces. For example, Bujnowski has analysed how paintings are perceived, showing them as commodities, unmasking their “commercial” side and the fluid border between painting and the banal reality. The pieces in the Zmierzch series are more hermetic in character. The recorded process of painting over the landscape evokes questions about the relations between painting and reality, about the possibilities of its representation and the methods which the artist uses for that purpose. The paint applied by the brush seems to be following the dusk and begins to dominate the view entirely, changing the hyperrealist urban landscape into a picture which does not really present anything. The meticulous and focused process of transforming the convention from realism to monochromatic abstraction exposes the very process of painting and asks a question about its limits – about the moment in which the artist can decide that the image being painted is satisfactory in representing the observed reality.

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