Andrzej Wasilewski

Pin-ups (2009)

Program: Vernissage Pavilion B Friday (19.03) 09:00 p.m.

Andrzej Wasilewski – born in 1975. Obtained the diploma in 2000 at the Department of Fine Arts, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. The idea of pin-ups consists in creating ambiguously esthetic space. It is a juxtaposition of fetish artificiality – understood as (sometimes) dim object of an art lust. A comparison of pictures, objects, showing feminised but also anorogenic bodies, as a projection of hidden desires (sweetly stylised in pin-up, retro, glamour convention), with the aestheticised grunge – rotten fruit (apples treated also as a symbol), moulding gelatin goo of a post-osseous product. At the first glance they seem to be appetizing, tasty. Jellied goo, colourfully and outwardly nicely putrescent apples fill various places, creating another picture (consisting of subpictures) just like in the Greeneway's movie entitled Drowning by numbers.

Andrzej Wasilewski pursues fully autonomic art, where the main trail is multidirectional perception and criticism of modern reality. A landmark of Wasilewski's art is its technological form (systems composed of many cables, monitors, displays and mechanisms), conveying humanistic essence with the moral message (political, social, ecological, catastrophic). In such constructed transmission, the aesthetics of global culture – both mass and niche – constitutes an inevitable part. Omnipresent pop culture, remade and placed in a new way, in Wasilewski's works takes on a sinister
dimension. It also triggers artist's autoreflection, an artist, who, in almost every work, asks questions about the point of artistic work, 'paintings' reduplication and creative replication. That is why, i.a., his realisations are always extremely personal, what together with their cultural and theoretical background constitutes a complex, autoironical when interpreted, but at the same time formally effective art.

One of the most distinguishing features of Andrzej Wasilewski is criticism and deconstruction of mass culture, understood as a collective agreement, illusion, or even a lie. In Wasilewski's works this deconstruction puts on a form of fake mask of the circle of Western Civilisation, which the author tears off. The artist traces its falsifications through the quotations from the official media iconography and different fields such as high culture or politically correct media, negated or ignored (video games, subcultures aesthetics, anarchy). Very often all those themes fulfill each other, creating a multileveled story about the modern world.

Przemysław Jędrowski