Dominik Lejman | Close Enough, 2009, acrylic on canvas, video projection, 150x130 cm, Courtesy ZAK BRANICKA

ZAK BRANICKA Lindenstraße 35 10969 Berlin Germany (city map) Send E-mail tel +49 (0)30 - 611 07 375 www.zak-branicka.blogspot.com

DOMINIK LEJMAN Afterparty

September 22nd – November 14th 2009
Opening: September 25th, 2009, 6-9 pm

The Afterparty is set at a strange apex of suspension. Does it have an end point? Or could it be a permanent state? Ask Dominik Lejman. The moment when music still drips out of the ears and alcohol wades around in the brain, and when broken glass groans underfoot – it is the moment when everyone is gone and an uncomfortable silence takes control. Make-up streams down the empty faces, and behind the boarded up windows, a new day wakes up a city and you feel like a clown. You see and understand too much to admit the truth. The Afterparty is the end of levity. Exactly at this moment, these few seconds when time has delayed itself, is the topic of Domink Lejman’s work.

Lejman’s technique is innovative: he projects video onto the dark surface of monochromatic, abstractly painted canvases – in this way image and projection are optically merged. Despite Lejman’s depriving both media of their autonomy, he continues to consider the act one of pure painting, with the projector’s light as both the brush and its stroke. In that way, the traditional painting takes on a new factor: time. Domink Lejman’s paintings are time-based paintings.

With the help of surveillance cameras, and a slight delay the visitor unknowingly takes an unexpected roll in the work. The image of the viewer slowly appears onto the center of the canvas and is optically merged with the projection. Abruptly, dogs jump out from the corners of the painting with their snouts wide-open, they are just short of us and we are a few seconds too late to break out. Suddenly, the dogs freeze on their taut leashes. The range of time set by the Dominik Lejman’s paintings catches the viewer into the trap of the canvas. This is initially born because watching his work demands the amount of time defined by the length of a video, but it comes alive in that Lejman fences the viewer into the canvas. The viewer can see his or herself, but only in the few seconds when it is too late to act, too late to do anything, too late for everything.

The rescue may come in from works from Lejman’s Anti-depressant series. Abstractly painted models of the molecular composition of the most popular antidepressants are painted onto dark canvases and become the bases for projections. Crowds are projected onto the painted canvas, flowing into one sphere and out of another, once walking, then riding a bicycle and finally running. These masses are quoted from television news clips about military conflicts, and escaping terrorist attacks or catastrophes. Biochemistry on a micro-scale mixes with the macro-scale static. According to popular statistics, every 4 seconds someone in the world commits suicide. We see that is too late even to escape into an affected solace, into the Eucharist of our consumer-driven society.

The other canvas exhibited is a field of projection where an abstracted diagonal divides the painting into two areas. Every few seconds, the canvas suddenly transforms to show a cheap performance by a go-go dancer. Even when the projection ends, the minimalistic painting remains a dark, theatrical stage. Even when the lights switch off, the performance, or Afterparty, continues behind our eyelids in post-projection.