Witek has recently continued this de-contextualisation of the imagery with which we are consistently bombarded through the use of the material on which billboard adverts are printed. These large-scale, consumer-driven bulletins are recycled and reformed into the artist’s colour palette; the original image becomes lost within the sculptural installation that the viewer is left with. Witek’s process comments on contemporary modes of image-making and the potentially endless chains of derivatives to which one single photograph is subject. No longer is the index embedded within the signifying photograph, but instead it becomes just one step in a continuous flux of material; its context and history is constantly subject to re-appropriation.

Although Witek’s images may be anti-narrative in the traditional sense, being devoid of any visual connections between speaking subjects, this rupture allows for the temporal perception of the spectator to be brought forward. As the gaze moves over the image, deducing and carving a pathway through its many layers, Witek releases what avant-garde filmmaker, Malcolm Le Grice, calls ‘spectator time’: vision as function.

Joseph Constable

Gallery Press Text

http://letrangere.net/exhibitions/future/ 

 

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Installation View, “Archives, Re-Assemblances and Surveys”, Klovicevi dvori Gallery, Zagreb 2014

Photo: Ana Opalić