Patrycja Orzechowska

The subtitle of Patrycja Orzechowska’s exhibition contains a mysterious word, ‘lunatypes’. This is a beautiful name, invented by the artist to describe a specific type of her own technique as used in these works. However, the name itself does not explain anything, on the contrary—it obfuscates. “I invented the technique for these works and called it ‘lunatype’ because it is an unconscious acting in sleep, based on exposure to the light of the moon. Don’t ask me what specifically it is based on because I do not remember. Well, can a sleepwalker remember what he did in the dark?”¹ replies the artist to Krzysztof Malkowski’s inquisitive questions. The unsolved mystery, included in the description of the technique, is inscribed in the idea of the artist’s two latest series: Phantoms and Nos Duo ^{[We Two]}. Introducing red herrings and taking the viewer by surprise with something unexpected but intriguing is Patrycja Orzechowska’s favourite style. She admits it openly, saying about her poster designs, “What I find more important in a poster than information and anecdote is something which will grasp my attention. Sometimes, it can be composition, a surprising association or, even, misinformation.”² The sense of her images made using photography is also based on the meanings which are purposely obscure and enigmatic. The moon, the night and mystery, evoked by the neologism ‘lunatype’, are the key words which precisely fit the poetics of these works and open the door to an enchanted garden full of dream-like images.

The word ‘image’ itself is the most important key to the world of thought and imagination from which the artist’s work emerges. This world is saturated with the fascination with the reality of images, being the alternative reality to this palpable one in which we move and where the indispensable principles like gravity and the arrow of time, heading towards the future from the past rule. An image, notwithstanding whether executed by the human hand or using a photographic lens, belongs to a sphere absolutely different from natural reality. Here, natural principles can be annulled or freely modified. Human figures are capable of emerging from nowhere and disappearing again in undefined space and time, while events can continue without any cause or aim.

The series Neosurrealistic Landscape ^{[Pejzaż neosurrealistyczny]} and Phantoms^[Fantomy] are puzzling arrangements based on an extraordinary juxtaposition of elements which create effective, fairy-tale or fantasy-like images. For example, a huge eye can appear in them to scrutinise a small heap of sand before it or, in another place, a landscape with a human figure and several spherical objects of the same size, all against eerie openings with artificial light seeping through them, which suggests perhaps a fragment of a submarine; or the close-up of an intensely blue head, submerged in water? with a thick ship’s rope weaving around the forehead and neck… Artificial light is the most important element in all of these images. This light divulges that everything is fiction here, taking the place of a theatre stage; everything is a show for the image’s sake. Patrycja Orzechowska is all of the time aware that what photography reproduces is visibility, not reality. The more photography tries to be a direct view of reality (instead of being an image on a flat sheet of paper), which means that the illusion in the image reaches perfection, the more illusory the photography becomes, being nothing but a will-o’-the-wisp and a mirage a premeditated artificial likeness.

“Will we not say that our dexterity, in employing architecture, creates a house, while by employing painting, it can create a different house a dreamlike apparition, executed by the human hand for those who are not sleeping?” This is how Plato described the art of making images of the real world in his Sophist, considering this art the making of a copy of a copy, i.e. the image of material reality which is the reflection of the only truly existing idea of a thing. Ernst Gombrich, quoting the above, commented, “I do not know any other point of reference which would re-teach us the art of admiration better. Moreover, its value is by no means depreciated by the fact that many human-made phantasms created for those who do not sleep were expelled from its kingdom because they have proved too efficient as dream surrogates.”³

By indicating the images which are “too efficient as dream surrogates”, the philosopher comments on the illusionist practice of advertising which aims at alluring the receiver with a seeming reality of the world which is actually absolutely artificial. Advertising images do it only to deaden the viewer’s rational thinking and his sense of reality. “Painting is taught at schools and practised by amateurs as a therapy or a time-killer, and many dilettantes use gimmicks which to Giotto’s eyes would appear as pure magic. His contemporaries would be amazed even by a primitive colourful label on a box of cornflakes. I do not know, however, whether there are people who would draw the conclusion that the box is something better than Giotto’s art. Certainly, I do not count myself among them.”⁴ The word ‘painting’ may even more readily be replaced by ‘photography’ here. Effective, illusory representations, which intermingle the real and the fictional worlds, are no longer the domain of advertising only. They now function in art as a ‘simulacrum’, an object in which, by definition, the fictitious image cannot be differentiated from its material basis.

However, Patrycja Orzechowska’s creative quest and her concept of the image go against this trend. Although she considers the illusionism of photography its most important feature and this is the reason why she uses this medium, the fictitious world of images is only valuable to her if it creates an independent reality, decisively and easily discernible from the natural one. In contrast to the artists who make ‘simulacra’ the images which have abandoned the traditional rectangular frame to blur with reality she makes her works emphasise their status as that of an artificial and conventional picture. Limited by the rectangular framing, they constitute a separate material object, even stronger than a classical painting on canvas or a photograph on paper. They are metallic surfaces bearing a glimmering image on them, like old-fashioned Daguerreotypes or massive, heavy chests inside which a flickering image is encased. It is fiction unveiled within reality, like a dream in the frames of actual life.

Diaphragms ^[Przysłony] is the series from 2000, offering a metaphorical narrative of the image itself and what the image means against reality. The eponymous diaphragms are black rectangles placed centrally in photographs, blocking the major part of the image they are potential pictures which frame their own visual content in space. These flat rectangles finally turn out to be the sides of ‘a dark box’, a camera obscura outside which a gazing eye peeps. In Phantoms a series of weird apparitions which are not portraits but some kind of a double (as the artist herself calls them), the image is often framed not only in a rectangle but in a circle. The circular frame is the original shot of photography, corresponding to the aperture of the simplest camera and the shape of the lens itself. The placement of this image within a rectangular frame was directed by the need for the illusion of ‘the image in the window’ a direct view according to Renaissance principles. Therefore, the return to the circular form even more strongly emphasises the image-like character of the image than in the case of its traditional, rectangular form. The fictitious aspect of the image is its essence, which turns out to be kinship with a reality of a different kind. The placement of this image within a rectangular frame was directed by the need for the illusion of ‘the image in the window’ a direct view according to Renaissance principles. Therefore, the return to the circular form even more strongly emphasises the image-like character of the image than in the case of its traditional, rectangular form. The fictitious aspect of the image is its essence, which turns out to be the kinship with the reality of a different kind.

Ernst Gombrich in his Sztuka i złudzenie ^{[Polish translation: Art and Illusion]} says another important sentence, which, it seems, becomes more and more up-to-date with time: “Even today, the notion of fiction is not accessible directly to everyone.”⁵ This is especially so with photographers and their viewers when the fictitious character of an image is naively opposed to its real character, while the explicitness of documentaries is mistaken for their objective truth. In fact, however, the territory of an image, based on fiction, is the area where neither the truth nor falsehood of the real world are obligatory, similar to non-obligatory principles of gravity or consecutive flow in time. To be precise, inside the implied world of an image (in this ‘dark kingdom’ which is neither this or that, i.e.—neither truth nor falsehood, E.Ł., after Gombrich) there is a different truth and a different falsehood. After all, what sense can the question “Did Don Quixote really fight against windmills?” have outside the fictitious world of a piece? What is the opposite of the fictitious is not truth but reality.

Patrycja Orzechowska’s works restore the proper place and significance to both reality and image. Reality is reality in them and fiction fiction. “You shouldn’t trust what you see, what the picture shows,”⁶ she says to Krzysztof Makowski. To let the game of meanings, feelings and apprehensions go which is the point of these quasi-photographs we need to have precisely delimited territories for both sides, as is the case in chess where black and white squares must be different from each other to make a game feasible.

However, the rules of the game for her latest series Nos Duo are slightly different from those in the artist’s earlier works. Compared to the Neosurrealistic Landscapes and Phantoms, they seem simple, almost literal, because the works have been stripped of their fantastic tales. There are no theatrical props any longer nor theatrically warm light derived from a fairy tale. They evoke simple and banal situations and figures, like a girl emerging from behind a wall, throwing a ball or making a gymnastic figure of a bridge, or gazing at a sheet of paper in her hand with a black circle in the centre. Yet, the latter example, even its description alone, makes one suspect that these situations are not really usual. A figure hiding behind a wall or coming from behind it has its double in the frame of a photograph similar but not identical, who performs the same or a reverse activity.

Orzechowska’s new works, similar to her older ones, emanate the atmosphere of an eerie and drowsy space which, however, is evoked not by the accumulation and juxtaposition of misfitting objects and the reversal of the scale of their sizes but is achieved thanks to obstinate repetitions and some sense of lacking, of the absence of what should appear in the frame of a regular photo. Next to the main motif, these photographs feature nothing but empty space, either dark or light, suggesting night or day. Duality, division into two, disappearing, and symmetry or, on the contrary, an intriguing asymmetry are the formal elements which spin the tale of the strange states of existence when one’s identity is shattered and questioned or, just the opposite, its presence becomes particularly intense. The former situation is grasped by the titles of the works: I Was Tomorrow ^{[Byłam jutro]}, I Will Be Yesterday ^{[Będę wczoraj]}, Split ^[Rozdwojona], Divisible by Two ^{[Podzielna przez dwa]}, Incomplete ^[Niecała]. The latter appears in the triptych whose titles are words denoting three different hours of the night. A figure, sitting on a white circle, determines time with itself or, rather, becomes pure time, becomes tantamount to it.

In Nos Duo, the game between fiction and the illusion of reality has been reversed, compared to earlier series. In the earlier photographs, the photographic illusion of reality made the inconceivable even more weird because it was almost palpable. In the new ones, what is common and literally reproduced turns out to be actually something absolutely unreal, pure fiction.

The themes of illusion, game, multiplication and disappearance which emerge from the metaphorical layer of significance in these works are also repeated by their form. The technique of ‘lunatypes’ makes a photograph only a quasi-photograph because it simultaneously becomes something more a massive object in which the image flickers and disappears. It is reminiscent of a screen and a projection from an old, worn-out celluloid tape. Patrycja Orzechowska admitted to have been inspired by it in the conversation with Krzysztof Makowski quoted earlier: “[…] I have always beenfascinated by the cinema, both as a mysterious place and a work of art. Cinema is so close to photography it is nothing else but a series of images set in motion… It is the whole world. While watching the first films, I had an impression that the silence which filled them was able to express so much. It was precisely this silence and the black-and-white image built from shadows and lights alone, deprived of any matter, that enchanted me”⁷.

Photography, which is something of an unrepeatable monotype (because these works are in single copies, often with manual processing of the image), something of a Daguerreotype, something of a film, and something of a photo-object a ‘magic box’ reveals its new, still undiscovered possibilities in Patrycja Orzechowska’s works. Approaching her medium with creative freedom, yet clearly alluding to the tradition of visual arts, the artist is both ultra-modern and conservative, in the proper understanding of the word that means respect for the basic and unquestionable values. In her ‘boxes with dreams’, which are full of artistic freedom, she stores a deep understanding of the European tradition of the image, delimited by the frames of the fictional world in which the entirely artificial illusion of reality appears.