Michał Gayer
Walking in the Night
Michał Gayer does not belong to a group of artists whose workings can be easily explained, or pigeonholed. "It is a sophisticated game with common thinking patterns, imposing new ways of deciphering reality" - wrote Zuzanna Sokołowska two years ago in Michał Gayer’s exhibition catalog Broken Codes.
The exhibition Walking in the Night rewinds and crosses a few plots with itself. Photographs taken at night inside the Regional Park of Culture and Recreation in Chorzów, which we'll see in the Bank Pekao Project Room, raises associations with horrors. The camera’s flash is the only connection into the illumination of the night’s fragments, branches, or clouds of steam. "This is a rather slight operation and is realized without any particular artistic purpose, but it is not devoid of meaning" - explains the artist. "The content itself is going out into the night, the lonely experience of emptiness, silence and freedom in the park, on the city’s terrain, whose dormant community ceases to function."
Besides the photos, at the exhibition Gayer tells a fictional story tinged with the tragedy of a Western film, where the hero turns out to be a lonely town tramp. "Urban Cowboy" is - or at least could be - a kind of archetype, an ideal for performing activities which we would never think of, in which we would not see sense in.
Gayer builds it from "mental scraps", presenting only his hypothetical attributes: a hat with felted cat hair, or a design on a plaid shirt constructed with colorful ribbons. Besides these traces of excellence, the exhibition will also include sculptures as well as drawings of masks referring to the aesthetics of primitive cultures; raw and sensual works that relate to the core emotions, savagery as well as the basic instincts that direct mankind. This last motive runs along with the rest throughout the entire exhibition, summoning the climate of the first images and objects created thousands of years ago in the darkness of caves, with the use of simple tools or even bare hands.
- Text by
- Marcin Krasny
