Haptic Aphorisms

Mário Caeiro

How can theory learn from contemporary art practices engaged in stretching that membrane [of
visual images], providing depth of field, slowing the tempo of perception, and allowing images
to expose a space of common political action?
Susan Buck Morss

For Humans are beings that participate in spaces unknown to physics.

Peter Sloterdijk

0. Preamble – From the exhibition to the pavillion

This text is dedicated to a moment. The moment I met Dominik Lejman in person, maybe at
3 our 4 in the morning, in the completely emptied Old Town of Torun. He came from Poznan
and was on his way to Gdansk. We met to check out what would be the conditions to produce
a new work for Skyway, the Light Festival in Torun which was heading for its second
edition. Under the statue of Copernicus (sorry, let me romanticize a bit the occasion), and
after a guided tour of more than one hour or so, I was told that the work would be a new
projection piece. In fact, a double projection piece, onto the round walls of two sister-
buildings, with very similar, if not the same architectural structure, and which seemed there
to entirely illustrate Foucault’s theory of the Panopticon: the Planetarium and the Prison.
Mercury – that was Lejman’s position in my urban scheme of installations (the concept was
to project the Solar System onto the urban form) – would stuck in my mind (and in the
public’s, for that matter) forever. A most sombre but also illuminating endeavour indeed.

This text is also a timely opportunity to reflect on a few personal insights arising from the
collaboration between curator and artist. It has been written in the spirit of a Foreword1. In
our case, I have been cooperating with Dominik Lejman since 2010 in the realization of
special projects and exhibitions dealing overtly with the problematic of the City and the
Public Space, promoting Urban Communication experiments for what I like to define as an
always-emerging Public Sphere. I see the following paragraphs as a discursive platform for a

1For Portuguese essayist João Barrento, the author of a foreword is always freer than the critic, for he/she is, paradoxically,
more “tied” to the work and the author. This might have to do with the antagonism between artistic production and critical
analysis, which the author of the Foreword tries to avoid, coming closer to the spirit and logic of the essay.

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theoretical position to meet a praxis, these few ideas coming from and circling around my
own experience of the processuality of Lejman’s work.

Scattered in the textual production on Dominik Lejman’s work we find several

approximations which help us to describe essential aspects of the artist’s highly refined
aesthetic language: time-based painting, light-paintings, haptic paintings, video frescoes…
Lejman himself describes his pieces, maybe with even more precision, as ghost paintings.
Complementing such rich conceptual constellation, I dare to propose one more notion which
might touch the core of this work as an artistic programme. For me, Lejman’s works are
haptic aphorisms. And it is in this condition that they are a decisive contribution for a rare
kind of spectatorship.

In the retrospective exhibition at Laznia Art Centre, symptomatically called “Healing Loop”,
the spectators encounter an array of spatiotemporal dispositions. The unfolding fence (PLOT,
2017) is a disturbingly univocal moment, the visitor being led to understand that he/she is
literally captured by an accumulation of layers of projected light (beyond the archetypal
situation of being enclosed, there is the obvious resonance with the currently mediatic issue
of the Refugee Crisis); in the black canvasses onto which films are projected (AFTER
PARTY [OXANA], 2009 and BASIC TRAINING, 2010), there’s another promise: tactile
proximity (sensual, if not erotic, in the case of the pole dancer, uncanny, if not plainly
menacing in the case of the attacked police dog instructor) displayed as a continuous play of
appearance/disappearance; another room, there is a Contemporary Holy Family (BEZ
TYTULU, 2017), a tenebrous painting strategically installed right by the luminous elevator
shaft and an eerie interactive device, a time-delayed surveillance projection (YO LO VI [II],
2007) actualizing the dramatically melancholic experience of the spectator’s impotence… ah,
an there is also, within a larger group video fresco (INCLINED PLANE, 2018), a self-portrait
of the artist as a climber (which the artist would later project also onto the façade of the
building, as I see in ulterior documentation). This is what I recall in the precise moment I am
writing these words, this is the recollection of images which comes to my mind when I recall
my visit2. It is the starting point for a sequence of departures, from this exhibition’s implicit
script to the larger narrative of the ensemble of a body of work which is regularly stretched to
the cityscape.

2 I did no effort to check the complete list of works presented, neither any image of the show.

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Dominik Lejman’s paintings with timecode – one more term that the artist uses to describe
his work – produce a specific kind of memory; maybe because in them there is the concretion
of a multidimentional complexity which is the result of an intelligible artistic strategy. In a
personal cartography, I will try to address it as the place of encounter of a set of concurrent
axioms. I believe they crystallize a particularly dense cluster of operative notions, which each
and every piece, as well as his oeuvre as a whole, managing to compact extraordinarily
succinct expressions of artistic autonomy.

I risk a metaphor – an image – to define Dominik Lejman’s consistency, brilliance and

structural identity: diamond’s pavilion (whose crown, for instance its pictures at such, I am
not at all interested in analysing). I explain, albeit with a question: can a carefully self-
contained artistic processuality illuminate the world and interpolate in the urban everyday its
imagetic auctoritas by means of a concrete geometry of fundamental actions? For the
moment, let’s consider seven visible sides of a jewel whose sharp culet strikes
Contemporaneity with extraordinarily (ir)relevant3 precision.

In 1849, Richard Wagner wrote a revolutionary essay on the Art-work of the Future.4 170
years later, I believe Lejman and only very few more Contemporary artists accept the
challenge to supersede the art of their day in the radical terms established by Wagner5. His
history of artistic modalities is a narrative on the way certain poietic adventures assume the
character of ‘lenses’ to see, understand and intervene in the world they are necessarily a
product of. That is precisely where the political meets the aesthetical, where the play with
regimes becomes a fundamental aspect of Human communication, full instantiation,
redemption. In Jacques Rancière’s terms, Lejman is redistributing the visual sensible like no
other citizen, choreographing encounters between spectators and between these spectators
and their very spectatorship. Between a public and that very public’s semblance. For
Massumi,
The concept of the semblance […] is designed to deal with the complication that, for example, what is seen
with or through vision, without actually being seen in vision, is nevertheless perceptually felt, in effect. The
semblance is the form in which what does not appear effectively expresses itself, in a way that must be
counted as real. (Massumi: 23)

3 See the notion of (ir)relevance in Agamben’n conceptualization of the Contemporary.

4 Written right after the failure of the 1848 Revolution, in an attempt to represent the possibility that the political uprising
could be achieved by aesthetical means.
5 For whom the Gesamtkunstwerk is less an operatic multimedia fantasy than a means to an end: the unity of individual

human beings, the unity of artists among themselves, and the unity of artists and the people. (Groys: 22)

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But beyond such a rare talent for making art – not the image – accessible, Lejman is one of
those few artists who manages to impress the spectators’ memory and mind with
unforgettable nano-narratives which in their social and urban immanence became part of our
way of thinking. Semblance leads an expanding cognitive process6. Because, as a
consequence, a semblance takes the abstraction inherent to object perception and carries it
to a higher power. (Massumi: 43) More, it gives life to the virtual: The virtual is abstract
event potential. Semblance is the manner in which the virtual actually appears. (Massumi: 13)

This is the process behind the artist’s performatic staging of a potentially interactive
narrative.

Narrative is another powerful device by which the actual discontinuity between drops of experience is passed
over. Interactivity involves a functional macro-continuity. Narrative produces a verbal meta-continuity. […]
It glosses things over after the fact. It’s “meta” in the etymological sense of “after.” It’s retrospective,
operating on the level of conscious revision. (Massumi: 66)

In this mindset – where each spectator’s self-storying reframes the event for ready insertion
in the larger operative envelope of socially regulated discourse (Massumi: 66) – it is my
intention here to articulate a couple of paragraphs on a few enlightening moments in an
impressive body of work, as if my own encounter with this aesthetics could be an example of
how Contemporary connectivity7 might be still relevant or irrelevant in our times of a
permanent crisis.

In other words, I have been lucky enough to be captured by Lejman’s compelling cinematic
bubbles8, my own and my fellow spectators’ cognitive and emotional projections becoming a
memorable experience of the inner horizon resulting from an enduringly rhetorical durée.

Following a highly personal and lonely path – not that lonely when it comes to the will and
the capacity for cooperation in interdisciplinary terms –, demonstrating since his first public
appearances a premature identity which has not stopped becoming stronger, he has no
intention to be tracked down by stagnation. He is curious, taking small little steps for one big
leap (Persons: 7). Every new retrospective show is the proof. It allows previous works to
sympathetically support the freshness and the surprise of the new ones, the ensemble of

6 Again for Massumi: The displacement from cognition, with its Cartesian stovepipe dream of foundational clearness and
distinctness, to the messy middling goings-on of pure experience in all its potential and complexity, has far-reaching
pragmatic consequences. (Massumi: 11)
7 We have to take a distance on the rhetoric of connectivity that has been so dominant in the areas of new media and new

technology. We will have to treat connectivity as a narrative, a meta- fictional revisionism. (Massumi: 67)
8 The term is Peter Sloterdijk’s, and I’ll come back to it later.

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intersections generated rhizomatically defining the core of a practice: an ongoing research on
the Staged Image.

1. Image beyond picture: (an introduction to) the Painter of Contemporary Life

It’s worth to think about what kind of stance the painter should take when pushed against a wall of
expectations. Expectations of a painting which he is to offer to the audience. The painting I offer to the
audience in Brussels is a projection painting.
Dominik Lejman

Lejman is an artist who doesn’t work in the logic of a strictly object-orientated series or
responding to the taste of the market. He’s more an independent researcher who one day
discovered a novel element in the grammar of Painting: the haptic projection. Since that
moment, he has explored, step by step, the potential of his discovery to generate a diverging
way of living the image. This is an essential task: to carving visual passages, for it’s precisely
the imagetic which defines our Contemporary condition (as early diagnosed by Guy Debord),
and this is where Humanism meets artistic Activism, Critique and a drive for the Spiritual
cross paths. Even if only to dwell on each other’s limit(ation)s.

In the epigraphy above, Dominik Lejman introduces one of his most impactful (and
unquestionably political) public space interventions, a double projection at the entrance of the
European Parliament in Brussels and in the French Garden near the BOZAR. It’s a
particularly clear example of how the Contemporary artist, by means of his/her motility,
literally co-opts the instances in the surrounding reality – from institutions to buildings and
the urban form – through a transformational approach of images. In this specific case, the
source is the Global archive of the internet, a networked universe of found footage that
Lejman is frequently keen to recur to.

So maybe it’s interesting to look at this work as the outcome of a metabolic9 agency, a
resilience to ideology, an innovative response to a crucial cultural demand for heterotopic
situations of vision. As we read in Foucault: What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art
has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life.

9 Should we not precisely understand the strongest subject as the most successful metabolic agent – the person who makes
the least secret of his hollowness, penetrability, and mediality? Should not the most decentered individuals accordingly be
understood as potentially the most powerful? (Sloterdijk: 95)

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(Foucault: 261) Operating from the standpoint of a Painter, Lejman sees Painting as a
historical modality which he explores and deepens, transcending it by means of a specific
alchemy of plastic and sociological procedures. And it seems to me that there is a crucial
moment of departure in the process, enacted time and time again: What I try to create in the
case of these two projects is basically examining the information, information which reaches
us on the everyday basis. The life of images becomes an individual presentation of Life itself.
Also because Dominik is that specific kind of artist who manages to integrate both an original
(creative) energy and a technical capacity to deal productively with all sorts of contingencies
in his working creative process.

This is valid a model for a Post-Contemporary art10 to create a public and of course ensure
the legitimacy of its fundamental (and specifically cognitive) aesthetic processes. That’s why
the artist – as the collector of building structures and urban landscapes – is constantly looking
around for anything11 – his fertilizer –, and from the information he receives, and that he
imagines potential viewers might enjoy processing, he establishes a (production) plan; every
new idea starts to take shape as the possibility for sites to become images.

The process the artist sets in motion carries a mark; it rarefies the visual landscape, the
streetscape, the cityscape. It creates simultaneously dynamic mindscapes, by means of a very
special iconological rhythm and economy. This elementary move undermines our common
landscape of trivialities, banalities, manipulation and alienation and seems concerned with a
subliminal objective: to generate images which affect the spectator(ship) as both an
imponderable co-presence and a remarkable memory. What appears is then a clearly defined
durational mediation fostering novel but also foundational relations between Self and Other,
beyond the debris of the society of opinion (Barrento).12

10 An art overcoming the scandal (the lesser posterity of Duchamp’s ready-made) or the most cynical, in the sense of
uninspired expressions of irony, or of a modest urban sublime, in order to pursue a new submerging beautiful, remaining in
the tradition in order to regain a cultural role in a devastated landscape Humans would be less and less the conscious
witnesses. A didactic art toward a transcendent urban-landscape within each and everyone’s soul. I steal the cosmopolitical
insight from the text by Renato Rizzi on the Cupola by Brunelleschi: Nella trama dei mattoni, nella tensione delle “vele”
permane immutata l’immagine di una Bildung transcendente urbano-paesaggistica e, nello stesso tempo quell’immagine,
malgrado tutto, continua a plasmare un altro mondo ritenuto erroneamente estinto: quelo interiore delle nostre anime
(Rizzi: 14).
11 Asked the question “What is fertiliser for your work?”, Dominik Lejman responded: Anything, which allows me to stay on

its surface when gaining the deeper meaning. Anything, which as the document, can be staged – projected on canvas, wall or
any other chosen surface, with its site-specific context. In http://artevie-publishing.de/dominik-lejman-ghost-paintings/
12 To recall Karl Kraus’s – the author of extraordinary aphorisms – scrutiny of its arrival.

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Lejman is a Painter of Contemporary Life13. Words Baudelaire wrote on Constantin Guys fit
him like a glove, as he’s certainly “the painter of the passing moment and of all the
suggestions of eternity it contains”. Still with Baudelaire – we shall keep in mind that “almost
all of our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on or sensations.” Dominik
seems to follow this motto literally, and literality is certainly a door to understand how his
projections work. I see them as the product of a highly charged literalness, bridging gesture
and community, art and worlding (Massumi: 110)14. What Calasso wrote on Kafka is then
maybe valid for Lejman: he can’t be understood if he isn’t taken literally. But the literal must
be grasped in all its power and in the vastness of its implications. (Calasso: 25a)

This leads me to a short reflection on the rhetorical balance in Dominik Lejman’s work. It is
a pleasure to make the effort of translating it into words, which implies researching into an
argumentarium, the dense cluster of issues any work by Dominik Lejman synthetizes. The
Classic structure of the rhetorical appeals (ethos/logos/pathos), which I like to apply, in the
spirit of Barthes, to the whole of any given situation of communication, is here helpful. It is a
model to virtually seize the value of art – or any given artwork – for the public sphere; and
for the perceptual investigation on the built environment that surrounds each one of us.

This is important because Lejman’s work is part of a specific tradition in art and knowledge,
where a techne meets the deed to represent the Human in relation to the very logic (and not
only logistics) of the Representation apparatuses (be they aesthetic, scientific or, as today,
more than ever, technoscientific). What Human? The Human in relation with the
transcendent, in processes of assessing reality and perceiving the aesthetic principle which in
the best of worlds (always an implicit dimension Dominik Lejman refers to, albeit in a
sombre tone) grounds its persuasive power in radically-universally valid principles to be
framed by the visual device (aesthetic principles which finally are never to be reducible to
function of making them explicit, for that would turn it into culture, not art).

Carefully avoiding the possibility that these images might be confounded with mere pictures,
the artist’s strategy seems to lie in a series of technical decisions which betray a very focused

13 I paraphrase the iconic title of the essay by Baudelaire – The Painter of Modern Life (1863); but should I explore that
possibility that Lejman is in fact The Painter of Post-Contemporary Life? To be continued…
14 We are not born into “the” world. We are thrown into worlding. Amodal experience, and the qualitative universe of

nonsensuous similarity it composes, are active in the constitution of the self worlding. The qualitative order plays an active
role in that constitution. It participates in emergence. It plays an ontogenetic role. (Massumi: 110)

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sense of measure. The scale and immediately perceptual impact of the image (in a strict
sense) are always calculated in their relation to existing geometries (topology); the visual
intensity of the projected images purposefully calibrated not to over-light their impact zone,
the positions – physical, but no only – of the potential spectators previously envisaged. The
elements of the process – the set of significant choices translating their origin and production
– are in any case so few that, of course, any neglect in their consideration would destroy the
specific effect of Lejman’s space-timecoded language. The affect of its rhetorical-aesthetical-
political balance.

All this makes it possible for the intrinsic relation between the projected images and their
‘canvas’ to be programmatically and experimentally approached – basically to turn the
canvas into an image and that final image into an empty vehicle for the viewer to project the
shadows of his/her own interpretation logics (of course allowing for a wide range of
projective resonances). As I will later underline, the loop and very different senses of rhythm
and duration are then there to remind the viewer that it is time to start to think if the idea has
already been ‘got’ or not. Every new cycle in the loop is thus a new entry in these worlds, as
many times necessary as to make sure the work is understood. The philosophy of the loop is
here an important aspect of the endeavour to engage the viewer with the durée of art.

On the other hand, whenever this kind of work is experienced less directly, through images in
catalogues for instance, the essential relation of the spectator’s gaze to the artistic
matter/material is practically destroyed. The concrete sense of spatial and contextual
immersion (new media site-specific installation – or, in other words, the construction in
space and of space (Parfait: 47) is lost, the works becoming pictures and not necessarily
images anymore. This is where the ephemeral loses its eventful weight and documentation
becomes the limit of the art object. Where the subtle situation created by the artwork is co-
opted by the ideology of art (the market, the field, its cultural dissemination – a secondary
process this text can’t avoid to be a pale epiphenomenon).

2. Superficial aphorisms – on how simplicity generates complexity

Messages, senders, channels, languages – these are the basic concepts, frequently
misunderstood, of a general science of visitability of something by something in something.

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 Peter Sloterdijk

Images in Lejman’s work are staged as eventful apparitions, the complex semblance of
fragmentary visual-projective processes. The expression of a paradoxically light gravitas: to
a certain degree they are the new Christs and Madonnas15 hanging in a desacralized urban
scene, fragile video ornaments using a most imponderable media: the projection of artificial
light beams. The point for me is that these deceptively pale, direct, short and repetitive
narratives work as para-religious spatial(ized) aphorisms. For a sort of nondefinable social
sacrum emerges from the will for co-presence that this fascinating discourse arouses, within
the spirit of the aphorism: concise statement performatically conveying a truth (and
simultaneously its own truth).

Relating the problematics of this artist’s concept of spatial inception and his iconological
appropriationism (typical of the Web 2.0 era) to the rhetorical stance which characterizes the
aphorism, I follow Sloterdijk when he states that perhaps one should say that when people
referred in former times to “spirit”, what they meant was always inspired spatial
communities? (Sloterdijk: 19). The paradox, in Lejman’s work, is that this insight takes the
shape of a performatics of the surface (deepening, stretching it). For attention to what is
essential, to the haptic invisible, turns each work into a visual interface. And it is of course
their aphoristic quality – in the sense that they are an oblique, cynical, effectively materialized
commentary to any sort of reason or ideology – is what grants them critical meaning. They
teach us how visual language works in space.

I thus see [sic] the projection work of Dominik Lejman as a collection of visual aphorisms
where a cluster of precisely defined narrative tropes (that we won’t be able to frame in any
sort of sloganeering) intersect surfaces; or should we say that they inhabit them if we focus
on the self-referential literality of so many of these bodies (the body social), only to produce
the choreography of their durational concepts. In this mindset, again, to talk or read about
these works without experiencing them falls short of the interpersonal-meditative stance they
represent; no strictly discursive description or reasoning is capable of transporting us to the
specific places these discretely haptic images transport us. In front of ALL OF US at the
Palace of the People piece, where and when am I taken to? Some sublime inner horizon.

15
Just like STATUS (1 HR WITH TIMECODE), 2005, is nu-Renaissancentism ‘Self-Portrait of the Artist’ resonating the
mournful pathos of the Dead Christ of Mantegna.

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In other words, by means of very basic and fundamental decisions defining the artistic
processuality, a maximum level of complexity is achieved. The spectator is captured by each
work’s/installation’s locality, straightforwardness and spaced literalness, but the way this
multidimensional aesthetic density prevails as an Image of Thought (and not, for instance the
representation of a feeling) derives from a radical – both careful and audacious – take on the
surface. Because it is traversed by moving spectres, haunting the places with aspects of Life.

Sometimes the surface (the canvas) is painted (in black) to receive the images) and
sometimes it’s about allowing a found wall – an architecture – to host the nomad
illuminations of the diverse videologic16 contents. In any case, these works are a result of a
deep awareness of the optical device which is transmuted into an immersive cinematic
experience. Gallery walls or the bricks of a façade become the superficial for the spectators’
mental processes of perception and engagement with the author’s image of the world.

Now, the point is to stage the spectator’s co-presence with maximum finesse and precision,
establishing a specific platform for the aesthetic encounter. This explains in part the works’
apparent – if not deceptive, for retinal art– simplicity. The images seem to be mediated just
by the very surfaces they fall onto. They are mediated by the real, only to tear the real’s veil
(I will come back to this Deleuzean idea), and thus to deepen our knowledge of its
(in)consistency17. Again, all happens, in a discreet, silent, intimate relation.

It is important to note here, with philosopher Nuno de Carvalho, that the critique of the
«violence of the represented» is one of the constant topoi in Deleuze’s aesthetic of the image.
In his work on the logic of sensation he adopts the adagio of Francis Bacon: better to paint
the scream instead of the horror18. Which leads to the tension between sensation and the
sensational. I’d add, since my jargon courts Spirituality, between the mediunic and the

16 By seeking a place in the art arena, video has questioned habits and posited as an artistic problem the relation between
outside and in, public and private, light and dark, individual and group, restriction and freedom, attention and consumption.
(Parfait: 47) This fact goes of course along with another, still underestimated in the current discourse on the potential
publicness of art: The projection has permitted other forms of boldness in and challenge to the museum space; freed from the
monitor, the projected image has become isotropic and has thus managed to take possession of all constructed surfaces,
from floor to ceiling, whatever the dimensions and the directions of these surfaces. (Parfait: 47)
17 Would be interesting to explore here the Buddhist critique of conventional reality, through the concept of vacuity of the

visible.
18 For Ospina: Francis Bacon meant to paint the scream, rather than the horror. For Deleuze, it is necessary to distinguish

between these two kinds of violence: that of the spectacle, which belongs to horror, and the order of figuration; and that of
sensation, which belongs to the scream and to the realm of the figural, where the figure has abandoned both narration and
representation. Choosing the scream and not horror, Bacon remains faithful to modern art’s motto as stated by Paul Klee:
‘Not to reproduce the visible, but to make visible’. (Ospina: 19)

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mediatic, precisely because the superficial becomes a question of literalness. The issue at
stake is consequently the aforementioned semblance of cognition, the cognitive encounter
with the staging of a spherology. And this is absolutely important for Intelligence only
receives the key stimuli for its own activity from other intelligence. Like language and
emotion, intelligence is not a subject, but a milieu or resonance circle. (Sloterdijk: 265)

This is a trademark and the consequence of great art; in other words, the very specific artistic
decisions which define this artist’s attitudes turn a cluster of issues into a tight ensemble of
recognizable themes which challenge the viewers – Humanity – to redefine their notions of
presence, relation, existence. Dominik Lejman unfolds his vision of Painting and of the role
of art in society in a crossroad where the ancient tradition of painting intersects video-based
new-post-media practice and an architectural sensibility. This mix courting (but not fully
becoming) interactivity19) conveys a peculiar theatrical-cinematic-post-minimalist-post-
postmedia artistic spherology by which the mind’s attention is first captivated/captured and
then put at work. This generates a subtle conversation on cultural values. And on various
dimensions of the ineffable (even when immediately recognizable themes and socio-political
contexts in the core of each work’s conceptualization are clearly outlined). Ultimately, it’s
about decoding cultural codes: and when it leads to a reconfiguration of urban surfaces – for
Anda Rottenberg, the sense of the picture is how it is used (Rottenberg: 11) –, the political
potential of such operations of visualisation of meaning stands for more than a personal
fantasy; maybe agency toward transpersonal awareness, promoting a fundamental attention
for outside([r]s).

In these works’ democratic pathos there is thus only one spectator (each and any of us),
independently of our background, class, social status, education, etc. I’d add here,
paraphrasing Agamben, that the spectator is a spectator any, invited to live his/her interested
vision.
So the process I’m talking about can’t ever be contained by any elitism because it always potentially exceeds,
at very least on its outermost fringes, any standard of taste or coolness that a particular social grouping might
succeed in imposing on it. It’s the opposite of all that. It’s intensify- ing. Enlivening. Potentializing. (Massumi:
51)

19What is central to interactive art is not so much the aesthetic form in which a work presents itself to an audience—as in
more traditional arts like painting, sculpture, and video installation art—but the behavior the work triggers in the viewer.
The viewer then becomes a participant in the work, which behaves in response to the participant’s actions. Interactive art
needs behavior on both sides of the classical dichotomy of object and viewer. Paintings or installations also trigger certain
behaviors—from contemplation to excitement—but they themselves do not change as a result of the behavior they inspire in
their audiences. It’s one-way traffic; there’s no exchange. (Massumi: 39)

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Such inclusive potentializing of meaning, being performed as a challenge to our attention to
our own place in the world (the criticality of the notions of stage and the now), leads to the
emergence of a dialogical sphere of conversations (comments on the relation of these images
with the media, exceptionally evident in PLOT or YO LO VI [II], whose title says it all),
framing the whole of the works’ procedures in a parallel discursive reality by means of which
the socius is voiced, through shreds of a mundialized para-fiction. Fiction in the sense of a
productive ‘false’:

Mobilizing intrepidly future-facing creative thought-powers of language, in a mode we might categorize as

purely imaginative (literature) or purely speculative (philosophy), is a political act: constructive of alternate
future paths for the world that extend its qualitative-relational universe of life and the forms of life that
potentially co-compose through it. Language, seen from this perspective, harbors what Deleuze calls “powers
of the false” (Deleuze 1989, 126–155, 274–175). He inflects “false” away from “erroneous,” toward “not yet.”
Powers of the false as yet correspond to no truth, for the simple reason that they produce truths. (Massumi:
121)

This is why Lejman’s superficial approach of the public sphere (telling the truth of the lie),
along with his oblique approach of myths, fears, dreams, horrors, becomes a portal20 to a not-
strictly-discursive total rhetoric (and an ethics of the artwork) without which the very
discourse on the political is empty, or a set of mere a scholastic exercise. For this kind of art
turns reality – his canvas – into psychodynamic passages. Like enigmas (Adorno) with no
absolute solution but profound inner appeal.

In sum, this kind of works’ cultural significance (Wiorko: 2)21 results from the eloquence
attained by their specific spatialization of the durée of the artistic encounter, never imposing
the spectacular but carefully displayed as an invitation to what Wiorko calls chirurgical
enlightenment (Wiórko. 2). This is the consequence of the literal bouncing of methodological,
technical, processual, and aesthetic decisions on each other, turning the artwork into a sort of
inevitable, immanent, and finally eloquent form of Human vision. And a well-founded
opinion.

3. Tearing of the veil of the real – a philosophical excursion

20 Everything in a building is a portal, not just the portals. An architectural construction is a portal through which I can
experience something that isn’t me, with or without some empirical guarantee that something that isn’t me actually exists. A
work of art is thus on one side of reality, albeit in a magical and strange way. (Morton: 13) More, for Morton, and this in a
idea he puts in italic, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. (Morton: 15)
21 Agata Wiorko notes the sheer originality and relevance of his art for the contemporary public sphere and in particular for

studies on the possibilities of staging the Human.

12
The matter at stake is the conversion of the gaze. The Portuguese philosopher Nuno de
Carvalho, recalling an episode in Roberto Rosselini’s Europe 51, reflects on the same tension
between image and the real that I believe underlies Dominik Lejman’s cinema.22 For Nuno,
thre is a moment when an order of representation, where things have a pre-determined place
– which Deleuze in Difference and Repetition qualifies as «sedentary distribution» – that
gives way to a perceptual-affective delirium of sorts, which is the consequence of an
emerging un-working on the sensible/sensitivity/sensibility and that will inscribe thought in
the image ( Carvalho: )
In other words, in every Dominik Lejman piece, and again, in his work’s proceedings as a
whole – the pavilion of the diamond, as we witnessed at Laznia – is an undeniable expression
of the Deleuzean image-thought. In Massumi’s terms: When we pause to think, this is what
we’re doing: continuing life abstractly. Intensely. (Massumi: 118). Thus the different works
of Dominik Lejman result in successive encounters with something which forces its eruption,
its birth in the world (Carvalho: ), in the form of sequences of scenes each spectator is almost
pushed to edit in their own processes of montage (within a specific) diagram, of course.

Lejman considers himself a Painter, but wouldn’t certainly be shocked if one

describes him as a director of urban movies, within the new kind of cinema Deleuze has
postulated in Image-Thought – not anymore a procedure of recognition (reconhecimento, in
Portuguese), but of knowledge (conhecimento, in Portuguese), superceding our retinal habits.
Contaminating them: Following the steps of Bergson (specifically Matter and Memory),
Deleuze argues that this new cinema gives birth to a new regime of faculties and a
redefinition of the image status: the image becomes pure, without trace of clichés, in all its
excess of horror and beauty23.

All this after all, isn’t it related to necessity of actualization of the consequence of the
Kantian Project, art as an enigmatically cognitive/qualitative experience?

4. The Image as staged event, the spectator as witness

[…] the spirit, in its own way, is in space.

Peter Sloterdijk

22 Cf. (Carvalho: ) abou the iniatic parcours of Ingrid Bergman in Rosselini´s fim, from na ordinary bourgeois housewife to
somenone who learned to see the real beyond clichés.
23 (Deleuze: p. 32)

13
Maybe Lejman’s art, whether the artist is aware of this or not, is proposing a middle way
between the highest religious schemes and the lowest forms of being-among-one-another
(Heiddegger). A social sacrum’s re-presentation – the enigma as a sort of everyday icon – is
what the artist promotes, triggering in the spectator what Simondon calls affective atunement.
It all leads, most crucially, to the common recognition of the monstrous (Sloterdijk: 627),
togetherness in the core of a broad understanding of citizenship. Each work’s staging is, one
on side, a visual concretion of diverse problematics and visions (hallucinations to a certain
extent) beyond any recognizable ethno-documentarist inventio; and on the other the
stablishing of a bond.
Thus the miracle of the strong relationship continues inconspicuously in the “they”; fallen
from all high heavens, “they” is still grounded in a place specific only to itself. […]
Everyday existence, because it is in the world is always blessed with an ecstatic intimacy,
even if it is too sluggish to have any notion thereof. Whoever is in the world inhabits a
place in which, by virtue of the In’s structure, the strong relationship has always already
asserted its claim. Dasein is itself a place, one that is disclosed through the mutual
inhabitation of those confusedly existing in a state of being-there-with. (Sloterdijk: 627-
628)

In an informal conversation with author Pedro Teixeira da Mota, on the occasion of the
presentation of the installation Ora Pro Nobis in Lisbon24, we listen to Lejman once more
explaining where he comes from, what he is, and where he is going. Pushing the viewer into a
particular situation, between two projections, one of an octopus (the animal), the other of a
hovering female body (the spirit),
[…] Image is not about accessibility. It’s the other way around. Because if it’s accessible,
it becomes a picture. And I’m interested in images. And you’re not able to access the
sensation of the octopus, or beyond without gravity. These two states of matter that are
alien, that we’re not able to access. Their inaccessibility is really important, because I’m
a painter, I don’t think about giving a visual information that’s accessible, it’s about the
surface that allows me to go deeper, in this kind of stage between these two images and
that you’re not able to access.25

Lejman explores the cognitive limits and affective potential of the projections of images. The
staged concision of the situations created by his Painting may be envisaged, from the

24 A production by Projecto Travessa da Ermida, in the framework of VICENTE, an initiative on mythical public space.
25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGeLbYzbnQY

14
standpoint of philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in the opening of a fundamental trilogy in his
work, as a never-ending mosaic, a growing cabinet de sphérologies. In this sense, every new
work, exhibition project or retrospective adds new intriguing escape lines to a cultural
horizon they rhizomatically define; we are dealing with an expanding thought-exhibition-
making26:

In their self-defined limited existence, these images are thus not simulacra (Baudrillard), but
imagetic portals. The topic of a living totality thus may be asserted as a metaphysical aspect
in Lejman’s work which confirms each and every projection as a portal to an open-ended but
always empathic narrative – of Humankind(ness).Within such ethical position, Lejman surely
is always very interested in the way images are born, survive or prevail under today’s
conditions of opticality. And this he does considering that any surface is a potential canvas
for his visions to gain life. He thus transmutes the notion of superficiality in Painting into a
building block for an activist philosophy (Massumi) of the Image in space,
staging/performing it both in the urban realm and the white cube, and the controlled settings
of museological exhibitionism, diverse urban and social situations.

It is in this mindset that this is an art which in addition promotes like no other the potential of
Being within an ecology of images. And as a matter of fact, when one starts to ask naughty
questions (the way Latour has put it), concerning the nature-culture continuum, there is no
chance of understanding Being without all the apparently superficial little things that make it
exist from moment to moment. Sloterdijk uses the term life supports, and Morton, in his little
but compellingly inspiring theory of Portals – where past and future meet without touching –,
asserts: These portals will in turn allow us to glimpse something basic and profound about
what things are in general, because to be a thing at all is to be a portal. (Morton: 13)

This nomadology of the projected image, and the implied dromology (Virilio) generate an
extraordinary sense of Mitsein precisely because, in the spirit of Latour, it turns what would
otherwise be just physical limits (Grenzen), and the way they express sociological or
ideological divides – into operative factors of our individual and collective identity: Passages
(Passagen). Not Grenzen. Walls and façades become mirrors for reflection, literally.
Precisely because Being, in the city, is about being aware of surfaces, and turning them into a

26 I rephrase Bruno Latour’s notion of “thought-exhibition” (Gedanke Austellung), the equivalent of a “though experiment”
in Science. See: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/115-SPACE-HARVARD-GB.pdf

15
vital – in the Sloterdijkean sense of giving priority to the inside – prolonging of our
perceptual, aesthetic and ethical engagement.

Teixeira da Mota notes on this refute of loneliness that [Lejman’s] idea of inaccessibility is to
provoke in the viewer a certain kind of mystery and bewilderment.27 Yes, mystery is a key-
word here: What recent philosophers have termed forgetfulness of being [Seinsvergessenheit] is most
evident as an obstinate willful ignorance of the mysterious place of existence. (Sloterdijk: 27)
And in fact, what we felt in Lisbon was an enduring joy, the pleasure of seeing ourselves as
we are: between animal and spirit, creature and soul, and so on.

Concerning the enquiry into our location (Sloterdijk: 28), the limits of one’s capacity for
transference are the limits of one’s world (Sloterdijk: 13); so the above mentioned kind of
magic and subliminal level of aesthetic provocation, in particular when bordering on what
might be commonly accepted as beautiful, may be a most counterspectacular way to engage
spectators in a new optical-social dimension, in a new meaning of Painting and Art highly
capable of dignifying our Human-Urban Condition. Maybe of transmitting, in their symbiotic
translucence, the Indestructible:
‘Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself,
though both that indestructible self something and his own trust in it may remain
permanently concealed from him’ (no. 50). This is literally saying that a man may not put
any trust in the Indestructible, yet this absence of trust is trust all the same. Here Kafka
takes a step further towards the total paradox where, as in the figure in his ‘A Wish to Be
a Red Indian’, the final strut is kicked away, the last vestige of a reality removed, and the
essence itself revealed. Even the man who lives his life in suffering, who lets evil sit snugly
against his gums, guiding his speech, who has no trust, is in eternity blissful, good, and
trustful, without any detectable change in the original condition. ‘The Indestructable’,
Kafka writes, ‘is one; it is every individual man, and at the same time it is common to all,
and this is the reason for the unparalleled, inseparable union of mankind’ (no. 70/71).
This paradisal state is beyond all cognizance, one can only ‘be’ it, but in this ‘being’ one
shares in the whole human essence. Punning on the word ‘sein’ in German, Kafka
remarks that it means both ‘to be’, and ‘to belong to Him’; in short true being is here
associated with a unity not so much with all men (though with them, too) as with a
personal God, as though he and the Indestructible were one and the same. (Gray: 196)

I underline here the parallellism with the architectural notion of l’inscalfibile in Renato Rizzi.
It stands undoubtedly for a specifically redeeming perspective on Beauty. Not the least
because any of Dominik Lejman’s work is an opportunity for the viewers to wash their senses

27 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGeLbYzbnQY

16
with their own interpretations. (Persons: 7) In any case, There it is, the most human of tasks,
to learn to accept beauty.28

I see here connections with a line of work which I’d acknowledge between the likes of
Robert Erwin’s conditional art – sculpture-as-image? –, or Francis Alÿs – performance-as-
image?29 –; artists whose main working tropes are complementary in the ways they lead the
Human toward a path of absolute commonness. When he films the ice-skaters at Rockefeller
Square and puts them on the staircase of a luxury hotel (“Skaters”, 2002), we’re witnessing
an emphatic mobile ethnography of urban life. In the city, and in the gallery no less, all is
interdependent of an enactment of the urban scapes and the very built environment as a
surface we might be aware of reading through. The paradox in Lejman’s projections is that
they remain as the latest adding in the urban palimpsest, but, at the same time, they cut across
reality and radically eliminate it’s non human/non-spiritual instances. This is particularly
clear – and literal – in the piece for Torun, in 2012: never a prison’s wall (or a Planetarium’s
round façade for that matter) were so transparent and at the same time so thick and
impenetrable.

So this kind of situated images are portals to the future and the past of culture, precisely by
means of the humblest of takes on the present – a pale non-image. The genius move in
Lejman is that his technique allows for a tactical relevance which other languages are
incapable of attaining. The fact that it is used in a framework of kinship with all the greats of
Painting, a personally lived passion for the pictorial, only reinforced a cultural background, a
civilizational status, that I am pretty sure most Contemporaries barely notice. Anyway, we
feel better by looking through the world he has created. (Persons: 7).

5. On ghosts and emblems and dreams

Retuning to projections, I don’t use them to make images visible but to make the sheer
projection visible. The projector does not serve to show the image, but to show the projection.
Dominik Lejman

28 Maria Filomena Molder, my translation (See Molder: 18).

29 In a conversation with Elie During, philosopher Alan Badiou explains that «radical» performance is on the side of non-art,
of life simply as emphasized, as if passing by. It would be the last form of a vow which goes back to German Romanticism:
life to be itself art, a poem of life. (Badiou: 25)

17
Again, in the literal intertwining of subjects and contexts, subjects and topics, arguably a
literary decantation of the Human Comedy – the Juggler, the Philosopher, the Dancer, the
Climber, the People… – the very aesthetic device in this works dignifies not only the
Looking but the becoming looked at, repeatedly (forever) entangling destinies and their little
absurdities displacements –, gestures… – nowhere as spectacularly in the jump of the
Suicidal (LET ME JUMP [40 S.], 2009). A work which I see as a sort of transpersonal self-
portrait, sublimating Humanity’s constitutional free-will.

Part of the process is necessarily to bring back to the surfaces intervened repressed realities
and invisible social patterns. Like in a democratic dream (Wiorko b: 3), these images are
spectres of lives, identities and roles, inscribing not exactly an alternative political
constellation, or a wild urban imaginarium for that matter, but simply the very possibility of
an ecology of co-presences in the surface of the world as a canvas. All the world is a video?
Shakespeare would love it.

An I even wonder, maybe overtaken by an arimanic nightmare inside me: do these projected
characters dream of their spectators? Do they daydream, these specters of a crowd
demonstrating in Seattle, or of these lizards and flamingos flâneuring in a hospital’s interior?
Or, better put: am I, for a moment, not only the Godly witness to these characters’ ongoing
rise and fall, but their dream’s semblance?

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and
thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a
butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself
again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or
whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there
is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.
(Zhuangzi)30

For Massumi, Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari converge with Whitehead on this idea.31 It
is helpful to understand how the dreamlike projections of Dominik Lejman are a living
emblem of transformation.

30https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Zhuangzi.
31Sensation fills out the plane of composition and is filled with itself by filling itself with what it contemplates: it is
‘enjoyment’ and ‘self-enjoyment.’ It is subject, or rather an inject. Plotinus defined all things as contemplations, not only
people and animals but plants, the earth, rocks. These are not Ideas we contemplate through concepts but the elements of
matter that we con- template through sensation. The plant contemplates by contracting the elements from which it
originates—light, carbon, and the salts—and it fills itself with colors and odours that in each case qualify its variety, its
composition: it is sensation in itself. It is as if flowers smell themselves by smelling what composes them. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994, 212; see also Deleuze 1994, 74–75) (Massumi: 183)

18
Better wake up. In his explorations, Lejman intertwines urban ethnology, spatial
anthropology, social psychology, cognition and spirituality. The pleonastic mix of aphoristic
pertinence through the weightless image is the result of a fascinating mechanical technicity32
– see the crucial artificiality of the loop –; this is for me reminiscent of the coming of things,
for each piece is an emblem of a sensational state (of being).

Let me explore this line of thought with a fictional anecdote. One day, the spirit of Kafka will
come back to Earth and he’ll step into a Dominik Lejman show – let’s say ‘Healing Loop’, in
Gdansk. The Bohemian ghost from Prague would finally experience what he himself
imagined cinema has been invented for33. Not to document the facts (Lumière), promote
fantasy (Méliès) or Hollywood evasion, but to allow our own mind to interpret the world
(Renoir). Since this Lejman guy – wonders Kafka – manages – quite like myself! – to
translate the highest, the lowest, the widest, the smallest and of course also the most literal
truths into the most basic procedures of the creative craft. And wow, these contained,
mathematical, yet fragile projections, with an in-between intensity, are as stable and
definitive as my fragments and aphorisms. Kafka’s wild imagination would then lead him to
imagine the artist as a tamer of ghostly spectres in a circus of images, his absolutely focused
musical geniality, in constant motion only to shape and polish the various sides of the
pavilion of a monumental diamond of images. A few days later, as we might guesse from his
diaries, he would even maybe fancy to add a chapter to Amerika, a sequel to the episode of
the Great Theatre of Oklahoma.

Unlike Kafka, Lejman has a daughter and loves to eat; this might explain why his dark side –
his worry on the existencial burden he and all of us carry – is tainted a luminous optimism,
the childish sense of humour he shares with Kafka finding a way out of the prison of
representations the world has become since the advent of Modernity, by means of a
counterhegemonic and mundialized aphorismology. For from within this aesthetic of
darkness, obscurity and oblique grace, what I envisage is the shimmering power of
illumination. A secret spiritual power, enacted with utmost simplicity, but no less a sense of

32The semblance, or pure appearance, of a thing is a kind of processual distance it takes on itself. (Massumi: 51)
33"Went to the movies. Wept. Matchless entertainment." Kafka, who loved archaic things, was equally fascinated with
cinema and wrote about it. In his diaries on this at the time revolutionary new medium, he symptomatically enough employs
the word Bild (meaning movie, but also image or painting). To be noted, Kafka’s literature never ceases to show a penchant
for visuality and an affinity to cinema’s mesmerizing immediacy (more than to photography a medium whose ‘flaws’ he
commented.

19
psychodynamic mise-en-abîme. Arguably another Baroque, as the invitation of Luc Tuymans
for Lejman to participate in Sanguine/Bloedrood in Antwerp (2018), proves. With
HARNESSED SWIMMER, 2009, ending up installed right to a Caravaggio, the circle is
complete. The Painter of Contemporary Life meets the inventor of the psychological space in
Painting.

Captured by Lejman’s mesmerizing loops, seduced by their characters’ slightly uncanny

moving stasis, the spectator learns that every great artist’s world is an experience of the limits
of the visible. Anda Rottenberg confirms this perspective:

The projects themselves, however, show different time and movement codes in relation to
the images they contain: in the looped films parachutists eternally fall and never touch the
ground, a ballerina never ceases to “levitate,” flamingos endlessly sway their long necks, a
crowd keeps rippling – until we shut off the equipment.
The reception of pieces of this sort is additionally problematized, or perhaps enriched, by
two other factors. One is the recurring principle of delay, which highlights the
“inadequacy” or our perception of reality compare to its actual state, particularly when
this perception comes through the media. The other, resulting substantially from the first
point, is the state of “incompletion” to which the artist compulsively returns, shifting
attention to the certain process itself, conceived as an ongoing act of construction; […]
this work only exists in the course of creation, with all of the changeable elements that fall
within its scope. (Rottenberg: 10-11)

A translational operation across languages (Painting, Art, institutions, the spectacle, urban
reality) and codes (control, manipulation, surveillance, culture, architecture, aesthetics).
Lejman’s projections simultaneously add to and rarefy the text of society; they fill it with
meaning while paradoxically emptying it out of significance, just like when one ‘awakens’ of
a semi-lucid half-dream. This is a very strong mystical experience, for being staged as
spectators of this mute world leads us to acknowledge the world’s fundamental vacuity. The
surface of anything becomes a passage to all. We stumble into eternity.

Paraphrasing Dorothy von Drathem, who quotes Lucretius, we look at these projections as
evaporating under the sun (von Drathem: 17) Such drift toward evanescence reveals itself
specially under the revealing twilight or when interrupted by the lights of a passing car or a
mobile phone (typical situations in Light Festivals). In their absolute translucency, these
images co-opt, detour or hack surfaces – of façades, or gallery walls, but also gardens and
beaches – to render them materially sensitive to visual enquire. Spaces become pages of a
book of marvels, elements of a Warburgian atlas unfolding a shared cosmological Humanity

20
resilient to the banal. The spectator waiting (for the video to appear, for the loop to finish, for
the moment his witnessing to become memory) is an integral part of these pieces. They
convene us for a durational-conversational-performative social accumulation. A sum-up of
brief but memorable encounters.

This ongoing accumulation of co-presences (mostly Human, but not exclusively) is generated
by the artist either as intimate one-one situations, or as portraits of the anonymous (the people
gathered in front the Palace of the People, for the speech of Kominka in 1966). The latter is a
particularly moving dance with time, literally a transmission of and from the past. In ALL OF
US (xxxx) – the people appear – the words are Lejman’s – as a sort of wave (and here one
sees again how a Painter’s gaze decodes a spiritual –communion (or, at least, its image) into a
form. The fact that these images are ‘concrete’ – staged operative abstractions – doesn’t
change the fact that they are just a formal veil protecting awareness from the excesses
luminous information.

In sum, I am now ready to affirm that in this para-monumentality of the shared instant, the
social turns abruptly into the Civilizational and simultaneously into the Spiritual. All in one
moment of spectatorship. I thus see Lejman’s work as a miraculous possibility to endure the
gargantuan imaginality of the Present. A set of specific intemporal anachronisms34 (just an
artistic processuality and its technical options, after all) help to shape the language of the
encounter between occasion and sense, as in the Greek idea of Kairos; without such
ephemeral unfolding of both historical and anthropolitical dimensions, of common sensing,
Public Sphere simply would not be.

6. (a)Political: Reporting (videos) from the front

Artistic practices that explicitly attempt to be political often fail at it, because they construe
being political as having political content, when what counts is the dynamic form.
Brian Massumi

Lejman’s videos are machines. As if designed to demonstrate their very processual identity
and multidimensional constituency, which imply a careful interpretation of surfaces, acute

34Renato Rizzi speaks on moving ideality, whose essence belongs to an anterior future: having been, and, at the same time,
not yet. (Rizzi: 14)

21
reconceptualization of sites and last but not the least enquiries on the notion of shared time –
all delaying Modernity? –; the results are an immersive experiment on space-time allowing
for an affective interruption of the everyday, as in what Massumi asserts as the political (in
the) event.
This is precisely what makes art political, in its own way. It can push further to the indeterminate but
relationally potentialized fringes of existing situations, beyond the limits of current framings or
regulatory principles. Aesthetic politics is an exploratory politics of invention, unbound,
unsubordinated to external finalities. (Massumi: 53)

I am no philosopher, neither an art critic or even a curator in the strict institutional sense. My
conceptual apparatus as a cultural activist is of a dilettante (one can glimpse the criticality of
the notion in Friedrich Schiller’s sentimental education). The drive for aesthetic-grounded
sense of justice (as in Schiller) always struck me, along with many Contemporary Critical
Theory insights. I like to envisage them through an alwayexpanding operative lens: Public
Space. In this mindset, the art of Dominik Lejman, an artistic perspective on space and time,
or better, space-time35, is particularly valid to understand the difference between ideological
status quo and imaginative hegemony (Gramsci). For when one feels the creative drive to
question (if not reinvent the social impact of) ideology – one major feature aspect of Critical
Art – we start to become aware that whatever we claim as ideas, are not really ideas. The
word idea means that it is universally valid (As U. R. Ananthamurthy, an Indian organic self-
proclaimed intellectual wisely puts it).

Molder reminds us the continuity between Baudelaire and Schiller, precisely concerning the
notion of the ideal. She reminds us that the Idéal necessarily points to elements of the
Modern poetic experience which the Spleen has deconfigured (and at the same time
inaugurated): nature behind us, Beauty as abyss. Now, what Schiller was well aware of, is
that only a Modern manages to point to an ideal, now that the Ancients are either whelmed or
being born again. For the search for the ideal is the only way to follow, once one is
simultaneously aware of the loss and accepts freedom as both harsh and exulting (Molder:
210-211)

35 For another Portuguese philosopher, Maria Filomena Molder, reflecting on her reading of Kant (what follows is my own
free translation): time and space, while elements of aesthetic recognition, are so to say incarnated. On one hand, time
appears as tradition, heritage, Nachfolge, or also as repetitive play of contemplative fruition, or as poetic or musical
rhythm. On the other hand, space presents itself with a sort of aura, as if breathing, which exhales and expands itself, either
as Gestalt, principle of formation in Painting, either as Form, principle of formation of the imagination. Spatial forms
develop around an inner axe, like a tree which grows and unfolds according to a plan which is impossible to grasp in its
wholeness. (Molder: 116)

22
Well, is it then possible to assert the projections of Dominik Lejman are ideational? I believe
yes, and that’s part of their appeal as Conceptual Art. Diverging, surely, from the ‘crowded’
text-art tradition, integrating other kind of (less overtly discoursive) playfulness; after all, in
the very nucleus of the ethics of Contextual Art (which arguably is nothing more than
Conceptual Art focused on Context) lies the will to establish the premises for a relation with
the concrete material world beyond distant representation, Duchampian subversion, or
conceptual and tautological autoreflection. (Hauser: 96) Again, the actuality of the beautiful
(Gadamer) of Lejman’s works lies in the capacity to integrate an emergent canon (Post-
Contemporary Aesthetics), within which the videos are as if living glimpses of universal
ideas, in the way they claim, not exhausting them of course, for relations of dignity between
the surfaces interrogated, the living creatures portrayed and overall experience of a
redeeming affect they embody when they hit the surface. Arguably a new Tragic sensibility?

It’s in this mindset that I see Lejman’s redistribution of the visible36 as a highly pedagogic37
approach of the artwork, as if the core of the politics of aesthetics could be the aesthetical
education of man. More, for architect Renato Rizzi: L’educazione sta all’ideal como
l’architettura sta all’attuale. (Rizzi: 13) Lejman’s Romantic Constructivism38 is then, when
one thinks of intensifying gestures capable of weaving art and politics in a sort of nu-
Gesamtkunstwerk form of political action (Massumi), an important provisional redefinition
of a medium: Painting.

Surely we know that the art of tomorrow is always a derivation of the art of the present – and
please don’t read my words in a reductively temporal way; what I mean is that we are lucky
to share Earth (the City) with artists such as Lejman, who not only do great art, but do it in
full transparency of image craftmanship (there are no secrets here, just sharable intellect and
a specific taste set in motion): as I am trying to underline, he is the ultimate Romantic
pedagogue39 of art for the sake of Urban Life, while not for a second stepping outside his

36 To be noted: The “politics of aesthetics” does not only have to do with “distributions of the sensible” (Rancière 2006).
More intensely, more inventively, and more powerfully, it has to with distributions between the sensible and the
nonsensuous: the double aesthetico-political economy of experience. (Massumi: 170)
37 We should not forget, with Renato Rizzi, that ideal and education are intimately linked (in German, the root of the word

Bildung betrays a fundamental relation with the Image (Bild). (Rizzi: 13)
38 When asked about his vocabulary, betraying a sort of new romanticism, Brian Massumi responds: There are worse things

to be accused of, I guess. Any time you try to talk about what happens in the world in qualitative terms, you’re bound to be
accused of waxing romantic. (Massumi: 84)
39 I am thinking of a Novalis aphorism: Die Natur soll moralish warden. Wir sind ihre Erzieher – ihre moralischen

Tangenten – ihre moralischen Reize.

23
very idiosyncratic production to ‘explain’, ‘frame’ or even ‘communicate’ the essence of
whatever he does. This is rare and most valuable, for it’s the only way to integrate true art –
and the artist as such – in any political spherology (which is always a futurant atmosphere).
This is about potential politics. But then, a potential politics is a politics of potential. And
what politics is not about potential? Qualitative-relational potential. Of forms of life in the
making. (Massumi: 169)

In a way, Lejman, an artist, a teacher, a citizen, embodies the artist as the medium that an
alwayemerging Community of spectators could relate to, in order to feel represented. There
lies its rhetorical power, in such a righteous relation between an activist cartography (of
specific subjects, narratives, etc.), and their public staging; the apparent forms of presentation
and the rise of models for the integration of all the issues as they keep coming to the selective
mind of the thinking artist; and finally the empowering affect that his aesthetic language
manages to convey and the fact that it covers a wide range of typologies of places (a topology
which allows us to look at his career as highly sensitive cultural seismograph of sorts).

But back to basics. My privileged area of work and my research field is the city, and
consequently also the urban fabric in its relation with the public sphere (Public Space), which
almost forces me to look at the artwork in indoor spaces, such as museums and galleries,
through the lens of the Urban Condition. In this relatively narrow framework, Lejman’s work
stands for a rare breed of actions, reporting from the front of Contemporary Artistic Urbanity.
Between the promenodology of the likes of Francis Alÿs (the nomadology of a nu-plein-air),
and Robert Irwin’s conditional40 approach of the sculptural image, Lejman’s social
ornaments (specially the urban ones), constitute an example of the public reality of art
(Grout).41

Lässt sich die Moralität wie der Verstand etc. objektivieren und organisieren? – Sichtbare Moral.
40 The ethic of ‘conditional art’ resides in embracing continuously shifting reality; the artistic approach opens with an

examination of all phenomena in a given situation, out of which the material, form, proportional and temporal dimensions of
the intervention result. […] The sequence of “site dominant”, “site adjusted,” and “site specific art” leads to and
culminates in “site conditioned/determined art”. (Plath: 345)
41 Massumi: I think of the work of Robert Irwin as showing a way. His work has always been concerned with staging what he

himself calls the perception of perception. In the early period, he practiced abstract art that created subtle, whole-field
movement from arrays of dots (Weschler 1982, 85–97). As in all his work, the effect takes time to set in, but when it does it is
absolutely scintillating. It’s less an out and out activity of vision than it is an activation of it. It’s like vision vibrates with its
own potential. (Massumi: 71) Further on, Massumi continues: I’m not trying to set up Irwin as a model either. I’m saying
that his installation work moves to a non-interactive relational limit of art experience, and that interactive art can take that
movement up in itself. I’m saying that Irwin’s installation work is at an experiential limit or pole that can itself be put into
resonance with another pole, at which experience has taken a certain distance on itself. The first pole is the living-in of
relation, the second its living-out. Relation out-lived is subordinated to recognized makings-sense, the conduct of outwardly
meaningful acts, action-reaction, instrumentation, function. Or if not so baldly to instrumentation, then still to mediation.

24
But unlike, say, Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections onto public monuments, which address
issues of urban legibility and livability within a certain communicational regime42, also
taking the urban situation as their object, Lejman’s projections take another path, even if
partly sharing a similar visual language. He seems to opt for a difference kind of balance
between rhetoric and the political, participation and monumentalyit. It might probably have
to do with his option for less demagogic images? In his own words, commenting the fact that
he sees Wodiczko as a sculptor – Sculpture tends to be ideological, unlike Painting – we get
what he means: I focus more on generating conditions for reflection than “selling truths”.
(Lejman: 15). Active passivity. The ideational vs. ideology.

The truth is, a certain kind of Video Art has always been about reporting from the front of
coexistence awareness (images for a new society, to paraphrase the title of an album by John
Cale). I’m thinking of installations such as Gary Hill’s VIEWER (1996), offering a
voyeuristic glimpse to the destinies of the victims of hard (unfair) working conditions.
There’s also something in fully immersive Video Art – I think of Dan Graham’s PRESENT
CONTINUOUS PAST(S) (1974) – which radically expand video’s original link to
representation, or the documentary, and where one frequently discerns social life as filtered
by the mechanicity of interaction, in a sustained phenomenological enquiry into architectured
space and time. In both cases, what is being generated is a forcefield of lived emergent values
and experiences. Commenting on this Graham’s most iconic work, Jacinto Lajeira speaks of
the way the artwork leads the spectator to enter another oneself: Dan Graham shows us that
what we are or think we are is never closed and defined, but rather shifting and unfinished.
(Lajeira: 149) In a single word, all this may imply a certain sense of videographic verité. The
true instead of the truth.

But then again, Lejman opts to remain somewhere between these two canons: PORTRAIT
OF A PHILOSOPHER (WARREN NIESLUCHOWSKI) (2012) is less a Minimalist
interactive painting than a Caravaggian reflection on intellectual hubris; Mariano juggling

And if not prosaically to function, then to intersubjective exchange mediated by instrumentation. The poles, however, can be
played off each other, or play with each other, so that the work produces a lived quality all its own, doubles itself
aesthetically in a semblance of itself, and at the same time actually does or tells something specific. The poles are not
necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, they always actually come together to some degree. Even in the most intensely lived-
in art practice, there is a minimum of recognition, making-sense, instrumentation, and function necessary to enable the work
to take off. A modicum of living-out is necessary for the work to occur. (Massumi: 73)
42 Lejman: If I have a certain truth about the world to convey, a certain ideology, then in fact, by situating it in the public

space, I’m using the same strategy as commercial entities. […] Of course, we can think about what it means to sell or not to
sell, but for me it is important, as far as the public space is concerned, to be able to say that I have nothing to say, so in a
sense to hand over the public space to the viewer. (Lejman: 15)

25
with skulls (DIFFICULT TO JUGGLE WITH SKULLS, 2013-2014) sooner than later leads
each spectator to fantasize not only on the specific character, but his/her own games of
survival. I mention these two works because I have shown them in a very specific context in
Tallinn43. There, in an old Medieval atmosphere, they demonstrated the capacity to rephrase
their own loops in a new socio-cultural context (as the utmost inner point of a spiral of events
in a boutique light Festival in the heart of the city). This to acknowledge that all works by
Lejman have the capacity to both depict the particular, the odd, the unheimlich, while keeping
a surprising sense of universality and translatibility.

Of course, as I witnessed myself during the production of this and other shows, complete
control of the objective conditions is necessary so that the artwork becomes the subject of its
own pure act. (Massumi: 159). Through a precise economy of visible (sememes) and
invisible (imaginable) signs (resonating the context’s traits44), orchestrating the rhythms and
punctae of the perceptive pleasure, in Lejman’s installations the cinematic mirrors a
multitude of layers (veils), as precise as transparent concerning the plastic operation (the very
context’s canvases as part of the image). Lejman is radiographing the surfaces of all sorts of
places to explore possibilities for their pulverization, possibilities which for a moment
become ideational nano-narratives. These literally spaced-out aphorisms are lived stages for
the stance of Painting.45

As I said before, this artist’s attitude is reduce his processes to a minimum of operative tools.
It’s no gimmick, it’s no maniera. It’s simply a most visually effective, socially legitimate and
ethically charged way to allow art (Painting) to enter the city’s public sphere and establishing
unseen dialogues without compromising art’s autonomy and a non-negotiable personal sense
of beauty. His urban paintings with timecode, in particular, stand paradoxically for a sort of
zero degree level of context – sites, spaces, contexts which these loops discretely interrupt (in
fact, inscribing a symbiotic meta-surface in the urban palimpsest) only to reinforce their own
potential of placeness, or situatedness.

43 https://luxmatrixtallinn.wordpress.com/concept/
44 A task not always made easier by the curator, her/himself a mediator of the divide between institutional-managerial
perspectives and the artistic vision.
45 One evening, in Torun, the city officials decided to shut down a certain set of urban lamps, to that the work – Mercury –

could be ‘better’ seen. Dominik was of course very upset and had to swiftly make sure that this unconscious attack on the
autonomy of his images would be thwarted… At that moment, he examined me that the whole point of the urban projection
was that the image would very slowly appear with the fall of the night, as if almost indistinctly arising from the illuminated
surface (in the case the round surface of the Prison, the canvas of at least three layers of light: day light, artificial light of
urban illumination and, symbiotically, the white cold light of Lejman’s projectors.

26
Paradoxically, in this image-driven take on the tradition of Minimalism, the theatricality of
the spectator arises with an extraordinary intensity, also because it is a response do the visual
pervasiveness of advertising and urban communication. These images are inhabitable (in the
sense Latour’s atmospheric politics). We are first captured by ‘what’s happening’ and soon
fascinated by their resilience to any of the prevailing regimes of visual interaction.46 In a way,
again, like a sort of circus number of Visual Culture which bypasses all the trivial aspects of
the spectacle’s programme in order to connect us immediately with a sublime Tragedy of the
Built Socius. We are invited to be the Chorus of.

But more, in this epic anti-spectacle of sorts there is no place for anxious drum rolling or
revolving colourful lights (like in most videomapping). It’s all very silent and serene. Zen.
No sound is heard (thus not gratuitous emotions evoked). The whole aesthetic outcome is
opposite to noise. The Grace of Gravity. In fact, in Schiller’s spirit – who somewhere
advocated art as the freedom of necessity – it edits the Human out of the noise, or vice versa
(for that matter).

7. Looped opticality

For me painting has been always the way of how I perceive, or express, the things that sort of
interest me and the things that for some reason may be also interesting for the viewers. My
work’s a particular type of optics.
Dominik Lejman

Lejman continues: Of course, it has to do with the way I approach the topic of time and how I
understand the representation of the human body, and the reasons why I don’t paint it on
canvas. Why are we dealing with a projection instead. Here I can recall words by Gilles
Deleuze: “Modern Painting begins when man no longer experiences himself as an essence,
but as an accident”. (Lejman: 17)

46When I said that what interactive art can do is take a situation as its “object,” that it could live up to its potential by then
cleaving the interactions it situated asunder, I meant something like this, but done with and through interactions. Not
suspending them altogether, but opening micro-intervals in them, so that there is a rhythm of departure and return between
nonsensuous perception of affective continuity on the one hand, and on the other hand actually emergent drops of
narrativizable experience precipitating determinate words and instrumentalizable experience precipitating gestures.
(Massumi: 73)

27
The construction of meaning demands division and articulation. The spectators will follow
the hands of the juggler of skulls until the accident happens. The dancer will circle around the
pole for just long enough for the viewer to anticipate her disappearance.47 The role of the
loop, it seems, is to reinforce the idea that each of these cinematic experiments concerns a
certain amount of visual information which is segmented in order for its relation to totality to
become operative.

In this universe of repetitive, looped, weightless and frequently absurd actions, the notion of
eternal return is one key-aspect of their literalness. But precisely because the episodes are
endlessly repeated, our mesmerized gaze finds time to dive into their punctum as if to look
for the way out ([e]scapes from their apparent confinement): we are then invited to interpret
what might seem to be the inspiration or the backing themes, as well as the choice of the
characters, the points of view, the sequences and the pauses, the specific musicality of a
movement, the intentionality of gestures, all part of the choreography of a Contemporary
dance macabre. And to share the fascination of the artist-director with his real characters (be
they Mariano the juggler he met in Barcelona or more recently his muse, Alina; or of course
32 parachuters48 he was happy to share an intense process of collaboration). People in their
lives, life for these people. Human beings, in their experience of in the face of time, forces of
nature and limits of the body – and with regard to a given place in the social system.

47 The first time I saw this piece was in the artist’s studio in Berlin, deep in the night, after an exhausting driving trip from
Poland. The ghostly appearances of this and other characters in the silent night, arising from the huge black canvases, was an
unforgettable experience. In a later interview by Dominik I read: Once the projection appears, we don’t look at the painting
in the same way. Never again will it bear associations with Barnett Newman or any other abstract artist. Forever it will
remain a stage with a pole where a go-go dancer begins the show. (Lejman: 31)
48 60’S CATHEDRAL involved the filming of 32 parachute jumpers falling from a height of 6 000 meters at a speed of 200

kilometers per hour. It is arguably one of Dominik Lejman’s most important works. It was produced for LUX SCIENTIA, an
European Project I was the author and the curator of. LUX SCIENTIA generated exceptional conditions for this work to
happen. It’s arguably the largest (if not the greatest) of Lejman’s projection pieces. On the general context: in the framework
of a trans-European collaboration three artists were commissioned to explore the scientific and aesthetic aspects of light and
create a lightwork to create a unique programme of work shared across three international light festivals: SKYWAY in
Poland (Toruñ), VALGUSFESTIVAL in Estonia (Tallinn), and LUMIERE in England (Durham). The three artists, Simeon
Nelson (UK), Leonardo Meigas (Estonia) and Dominik Lejman (Poland) collaborated with scientists and other people to
develop their lightwork and all three works explored both the scientific and aesthetic aspects of light. Lux Scientia aimed to
act as a platform for debate about how the different artists' vision related to their installation in different spaces and
environments, to raise awareness of a shared European heritage, foster mutual understanding, and celebrate the cultural
diversity. Crucially, three areas of knowledge were respectively addressed, in a multidimensional dialogue, offering an
alternative to the perceived stiff nature of scientific discussions. My own intention has been in fact to work on the
potential overlapping of three concurrent or complementary fields of Research and Knowledge (Physics, Biology and a less
stabilized area of research – which I attributed to Lejman: somewhere between or beyond Psychology, Bioethics, Cognitive
Science, Mind Studies and Religious Philosophy. In the words of the artist: the piece revealed shapes representing Christian
values. Concerning the very image Lejman proposed, one single comment: the parachuters would hold the cupola of the
Durham cathedral together for just 60 seconds (a lot of time for them, just a minute for us simple mortals below…). I would
later present the work in a group exhibition in 2012. It was dedicated to the object from the perspective of Public Art.

28
(Linkowska: 7) Beings the artist observes without a mentor’s zeal (Linkowska: 7), if not from
the point of view of an “anthropologist from Mars”(Lejman: 21).49

Even Staging Anonymous (2009) is like an allegory of Lejman’s cinema, compacted into one
single frame – as if a one image visual haiku. In this urban instalment of a photography, the
image consists in a most symbiotic mirror of the space where it is installed, playing with the
illusion of depth to turn an anonymous underground passage into a spatial experience. There
is than the ‘movie’ in itself, but also the endless film that one could imagine being edited,
with the images of all passers-by virtually accumulating until the end of times. Maybe each
and every passer-by, instead of the usual advertising image, is taking home (or to work) his
own Dominik Lejman imago of urban space. I see this kind of urban interpellations as the
outcome of an artistic language which manages to generate a conscientization of the urban
fabric which is expanding, and more, performing not only critical thinking but aesthetic
agency, in an attentive response to the urban form and the urban elements, either to observe,
détour or simply use them.

For these works’ poetic character is as vivid as their haptic qualities’ occurence, the spectator
being him/herself staged as a fundamental dimension of each piece. This is where the
moving/nomad/tactical formation of the image interprets, with chirurgical precision, the
creative tension between image and non-image. Just like in a sort of cinematic aphorism one
is invited to read, where the materiality of walls and found footage (sometimes new footage)
are overlapped to intensify the flatness of the real (the scenery). Of course, and again, it
works because the projected images are literally emptied of the triviality of the noise; the
punctum of the absence of colour, for instance, becomes the image of a more connected and
continuous transvisuality. Where the loop can be seen as a realistic take on the constraints of
the real’s visuality.

Maybe this opticality is a way to paint time, not space, for the aesthetic durée of each loop
stages the sharing of temporality; and yet certainly it is also a literal way to interrupt the
hectic, indifferent or simply unconscious misuses of the urban image, the way the built forms
appear to us, in order to favour an encounter – with the affective connection of the
semblance: pure appearance, of a thing is a kind of processual distance it takes on itself

49On the one hand, such display builds distance, but on the other, it paradoxically brings us closer to the very problem –
just like those white figures walking around the entrance to the European Parliament […]. (Lejman: 21)

29
(Massumi: 51). Or, now with Walter Benjamin: No work of art can appear completely alive
without becoming mere semblance, and ceasing to be a work of art. (In Massumi: 180)
Again, this stands for a radically counterhegemonic opticality, in the service of its own
political (ir)relevance in the Contemporary city and society.

Modernism’s radicality has been a lot about this: to explore the medium not for the sake of
the market, but of a public sphere of cognitive semblance (a task some artists assumed with
heroic endeavour concerning the research on form, others, less driven by hubris, as a discrete
unworking of alienation apparatta). In these terms, Lejman is certainly not a saint, or a hero,
and even less a cynic, he is a citizen for whom art and painting are approached as the only
creative modality adequate to enact a sort of optical parrhesia which is related to a painterly
resilience to the regime of images which undermines our very sense of presence in the here and now.
Or as Lejman has put in a text on his participation in VICENTE’1750: the sensation of the passing of
our NOW. (Lejman: 190b)

Obliquely, and again and again and again, the motility of these meticulous cinematic inserts
stands for the very possibility of an everyday sacred, arising from a delicate continuity of art
and natural perception. The body social is set in motion because the image appears. After all,
Animation, movement, is mostly what makes humans recognize the living from the dead in
nature on its most superficial level. (Lejman: 190b) Yes, the looped approach of a total flux is
there to make the Whole in all its impossible density to be perceived. The loop pumps the
heartbeat of art as an artificial construct.51

Of course, these are mouvements of bodies – hovering, climbing, hovering, dancing,

reading… –, whose phenomenological essence is (made) interdependent of the specific
concept of spectatorship resulting from each visual device the artist sets up. In Lejman’s
words, then

The matter of perception in art breaks and renders our memory as long as it becomes sensational
rather than remains merely illustrative. This specifically applies to all forms of art which require
the physical presence of the viewer in time and space where the work is presented. (Lejman: 190b)

I see in Lejman’s work privileged moments of encounter of each and one of us with the light
of the cosmos as materialized in looped images which are chameleonic in kind (so they can

50 It consisted in the double projection, on two opposite walls, of the video-murals ORA PRO NOBIS (2016) and
LIGHTWEIGHT (2015). For an amateur document on the occasion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGeLbYzbnQY.
51 Break-and-relate to make felt an effect: a definition of art. (Massumi: 37)

30
bypass, anonymously, secretly, the stupifying gargantuan (Stallabrass) visual regime we
were thrown into with the digital revolution). It’s a gravity-absent take on the urban scape,
the enactement of repetitive accidents in the white wall of the gallery, but always a landscape
for little discoveries.

Literally again… because Lejman uses low-res footage and cheap projectors not as an effort
in avoiding the hegemonic regimes of high resolution film or obsessively Faustian passion for
technology, but as precisely a sort of instant forward to a basic aesthetics which demands for
the public to suspend the vices of an ocularcentric civilization – precisely in order for the In’s
to search for more relational co-presence 52. It may be considered a radically psychological
move, if we consider that the subject is something that not only arranges itself within
symbolic orders, but is also taken up ecstatically into the shared activity of arranging the
world with others. (Sloterdijk: 84-85)

Such virtual ‘relationalism’ is literally multidimensional: again there’s the very surfaces of
concrete buildings and walls (ranging from the built heritage to the most irrelevant of
constructions) becoming tangible and alive in often immersive ways (notably PLOT, 2017 or
LITTLE DISCOVERIES, THE HOSPITAL AS A LANDSCAPE FOR THE LITTLE
DISCOVERIES, 2002) or inviting for an imponderable and critically visual contact with a
social ineffable (the paintings with appearing-disappearing characters); and there’s as I said
before work whose aphoristic quality is a sort of pure text: 60’’ Cathedral – where a nu-
spiritual gathering is spectacularly staged… in the sky. A momentous sacrum literally
between heaven and earth, the above and the down below, the real and the ideal. Over and
over again.

Lejman is clear about this core of this work on image (rather than visual information as he
wisely puts it): I am dealing with this visual information, but what’s most important for me is
how I’m translating this visual information into a particular optic way of the Painter’s mind.
The way how I think about the surrounding reality or how I can effectively reflect upon that
reality from the painter’s perspective. The present continuous is here absolutely crucial. This

52Sloterdijk notes that simply by looking inwards, every person becomes a Jonah – or more precisely, becomes prophet and
whale in a single body (Sloterdijk: 99).

31
is a process, each series of works adding a new angle in the complex panorama (a real-life-
size looped panorama of sorts) the artist is building in a continuum.

Lejman procedes in his genealogical disposition: The painter’s perspective is always a

superficial perspective, because painters were always attached to the surface, so I can be
superficial in terms of the way how I look at the surrounding reality. And I think it is a great
privilege. As I said before, Kafka – himself a fine drawer of Human postures – explored
(maybe not fully consciously, since obsessed with the format of the novel) the forms of the
fragmentary short story and the aphorism. For me, Lejman embodies this absolutely epic
materialism, fully translating all the theatricality53 of Post-Modern Art into an open-ended
accumulation of aphorisms, the most dense and intentional take on the fragment.

Maybe because the notion of artwork as departing from the notion of the fragment truly
‘speaks’ the language of reality (an idea decisively advanced by Walter Benjamin). In the
case of Lejman, images are aphoristic porcupines (Schlegel, in Cabau: 17)54 woven as it to
reveal the surface as narrative. Just like the texts of Kafka were all fragments of a non-
euclidean space-time continuum, as well as the outcome of radical attention and empathy,
Lejman goes ‘further’, redefining our sense of visual reality through a (Fontana-like) cut in
its surface (which redeems the burden of existence). The optical concept stretching the notion
of reality and co-existence, and again, literally. Retuning to projections, I don’t use them to
make images visible but to make the sheer projection visible. The projector does not serve to
show the image, but to show the projection. (Lejman: 19)55

In a recent book, covering no less than seven centuries of the history of Painting –
Invisualidade da Pintura – Uma História de Giotto a Naumann (2015), Carlos Vidal
forwards the idea that it’s important to take Paiting out of the territory of the Visual Arts. His
book is a history of Vision, uncovering aspects such as the mysterious and subjective spaces
that the visual sensation opens to perception, leading to the comprehension of the work of

53 Of course, the theatrical refers still to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. Again, it should be seen less as an anticipatory
reaction to the ideology of artistic disciplines (Greenberg, Fried), and more, as we see in Dominik Lejman, a model to
intensify the very role of art in society. This is why Lejman’s work is no less pure Painting than Social ornament (the latter,
in the very artist’s words). It doesn’t preclude a collective dimension.
54 For Friedrich Schlegel: The fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world

and be complete in itself like a porcupine.

55 This is the way the artist, now as if illustrating a major idea in Adorno, is building, as he puts it, an anaesthetising filter to

deal with the problems that form the ballast, the unbearable burden. (Lejman: 19) It is in this context and framework that
lightness and weight interest him; so the very wrapping of the hard surfaces of the city or of its institutions’ exhibition
spaces by the projected light could be no more than a manifestation of a redeeming act of painting.

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art.56 This suits Dominik Lejman particularly well, for whom art is more a field of praxis
(allowing a certain freedom and working conditions) than the pretext for a monadic identity
to experiment indulgingly. For this artist is well aware (and, consciously or not, critical) of
what Vidal calls the triumph of the gaze, a Western condition which secondarized narrative or
myth to dive into an excessive sea of images – a situation artists like Dominik Lejman
precisely manage to reconfigure, or com-pose.

This is why the images of Lejman are perfectly orchestrated cosi mentale, to paraphrase
Leonardo. In the very materiality of the spectacle (I think of Baudriallard’s phenomenology
of material imagination here), playing with the expectations of the spectator. The surface of
the city, the walls of museums and art galleries (public spaces par excellence, interfaces for
citizenship). They are philosophical. For the spectacle [which is merchandise transformed
into an empire] is the heir of all weakness within the Western philosophical project. Which
has been an understanding of the activity dominated by the categories of seeing, grounding
itself in the incessant enlarging of the technical rationality. (Vidal)

This is an art which is an antidote to the concupiscence of the gaze, to use, with Vidal, Saint
Augustine’s terms. And, furthermore, allows the ones embraced by their humble pride to re-
enact the resilience to vigilance, when not an activist sousveillance. Arguably, if in our
ocularcentric civilization there is still a link between Light an Illumination, it’s more than
time to acknowledge, with critical Light Art such as Lejman’s, that a most pertinent
challenge is to weave shadows into the over-illuminated publicness of the artwork; in the
case of Dominik Lejman, this becomes a sort of undercover operation of Light across the
image of reality we take for granted. There’s something of an x-ray here. But the body
perceptual behind the image obtained is our own cognitive operativity, a great step toward
social performativity.

Vidal sees in Caravaggio, the master of shadows, the beginning of this ‘countercultural
mouvement’. Unlike La Tour, whose functional light is rather symbolic and orchestrating a
sense of the natural and the physical, He invented Modern painting. Its light is not symbolic
or natural. It’s simply pictoric, an inventon of the painter. Vidal goes as far as to state that
Caravaggio (like Rembrandt and Velasquez) offers us a vision of touch. They all share a

56The author grounds his insights in the promenadology of Rousseau, who had toward art a ‘suspicion’; and well, only the
artist can suspect of art, states Vidal.

33
haptic quality, and with Lejman a specific and personal identity and precessuality in their
take on the will to ‘flee’ from the bi-dimensional picture.

Lejman is a new endpoint (thus also a beginning) of a long process full of anecdotic episodes.
One is famous: when Rauschenberg asked de Kooning for a drawing in order to erase it, he is
working form within the medium in order to research to pure opticality; and even if is
arguably not possible to produce a medium without the painting, it’s a genius effort (Vidal).
Or take Robert Ryman. He invented his vocabulary using gestures, white, and with it a
presentation device: if we get too close, we miss the whole. The paradox of this relation
between the part and the whole, for Vidal, lies in the fact that, when we understand how the
Painter works, we won’t get to know his painting; and when de get to know the painting as a
whole, the work as whole, what is lost is his vocabulary (for the medium dies for the work to
appear).

I thus see Lejman as one more (they are not that many) Contemporary agent of a long
tradition of resilience to Cartesian ocular passivity and obsessive praise of clarity (whose
breakthrough moment was the invention of perspective), as if to uncover hidden dimensions
of the construction of reality, precisely as invented by the artistic gaze. Artists – and artists
who, like, say, Goethe, think – need to un-work the visual through original optical processes,
and Vidal uses the word invisuality to cover this always revolutionary territory of action-
research; and if the Art of Literature has been not only performed but also theorized by
Romantics such as Novalis (or Kafka), today’s expanded forms of Painting turn to the likes of
Deleuze or Massumi to help us acknowledge their semblances’ worth.

So what does specifically Lejman valorize in his scandalously silent projection paintings?
The haptic potential of the visual, which stresses both its subservience within the optical
regimes and revolutionary virtuality; and this to explore the possibility that through
something visual in the strict sense, something invisual – in the sense of Vidal – finally finds
a way to appear. The semblance of the image. This is where the power of the literal meets the
seduction of the ephemeral and a chirurgical therapeutics of the built environment, to
generate little dynamos for spectatorship awareness57. Consequently, many of his works have

57 See Marie-José Mondzain’s theory on the Homo spectator.

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no less interpretability (Vidal) than absolute masterpieces such as Las Meninas by
Velázquez.58

In sum, what’s at stake here, exactly like in the imponderabilities of Lejman’s projections, is
not interpretation, but the power of interpretability. We know it might come from found
footage (not always); that these characters truly exist (although some are professional actors
performing a script); that these actions are frequently close to a dance (although mostly
performed by anonymous Humans)… and so on, and so on. But what we also feel is that
Lejman’s projections are our present’s Caravaggios and Rembrandts an, playing with the
surfaces of the over-lit city and the white walls of the global white cube system, with the
worn-out walls of heritage buildings or the most anonymous of underground passages to
interpellate our age’s blinding lights (Vidal). Instead of colour, black and white; instead of
high-definition, low-res; instead of the picture on the screen, the haptic image. By means of
such operative principles, one artist manages to re-present the whole of a cultural situation
where faster and faster images are since long numbing down the very Human sensibility
toward what’s around us (and thus also what’s within us). In the moment we live, a TINA59
regime of opticality, this is more than urgent, it’s necessary.

As I noted before, Lejman produces his approach of these reasonings within a minimalist
aesthetic not too far from Robert Irwins’s strategies of composing-away (Massumi: 158). And
it’s always important to recall how Minimalism cognitive matrix is about unbuilding forms
and structures, agglomerated spaces, turning them into discrete stages for an empathic gaze to
redefine its own presence, the body (as) political. This ‘explains’ furthermore the continuous
presence of the Human body – the Body Human – in Lejman’s projections. Layers and layers
of Human figures – small, larger, over each other, separated, ultimately project a sense of
People, of Community and even of Species (hence the recurrent appearance of the animal?)
which only Great Art – even if disguised as petit grand art (Pinson) attains. I see here a rather

58 It’s interesting to follow the reading of Vidal of this painting, one canvas where diverse dimensions of opticality interplay
to keep the gaze occupied with operative distinctions, readings: 1) the mirror in the back reflecting what the artist is
painting, thus the mirror is a reflection of the painting; 2) the mirror reflects the kings who are either observing Velázquez at
work or are being portrayed; 3) the mirror could not reflect the royal couple or what Velázquez is painting because the laws
of reflection would not allow it; 4) the mirror is a painting; 5) Velázquez is painting Filipe IV; 6) he is painting Infanta
Margarida; 7) we cannot conclude about what he is painting; 8) in a mise en abîme, Velázquez is painting the very Las
Meninas since the painting I front of him has the same dimensions as the one we see in the Prado).
59 TINA stands for There Is No Alternative. The phrase was coined by the Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer and would

become a slogan of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 80’s.

35
unexplored outcome of late-Modernist craft of the artistic device as the pretext for social
participation:
For “minimalism does announce a new interest in the body – again, not in form of an
anthropomorphic image or in the suggestion of an illusionist space of consciousness, but
rather in the presence of its objects, unitary and symmetrical as they often are (as Fried
saw), just like people.” (Foster: 43)

These paintings are then like the embodyment of our collective mind at work, and their power
of attraction and of seduction resides in their nightmarish effect – just like in Kafka’s
nightmares. Of course, this is partly a shared ethos with 60’s video art which relocated the
image as performance and, more rarely, discovered affect within the device. For Deleuze,
after all, what is specific of the gaze is the tear, not Seeing. And this care for an empathic
gaze is decisively in the works of Dominik Lejman, which avoids the flat irony of most of
post-modern aesthetics.

It is as if this is the art which today, still within the tradition of Painting, follows the path
opened by the likes of, say, Gerhard Richter, in their research on the invisible. In The Daily
Practice of Painting, the famous artist states that Painting is the production of an image
opening to something non-visible and non-understandable, in the sense of essential; which
means no less that the symbolic order, while by definition transcending our capacity to
understand, still leads us to a specific freedom: the freedom to postulate. In this mindset, it
seems we as The Public are for too long not seeing the most important; just like art has
always been about finding out how to make appear a determinant invisible. It might be
deemed the deepest of political tasks, if we listen to Novalis: POL[ITIK]. Wir sind mit dem
Unsichtbaren näher, als mit dem Sichtbaren verbunden. (mystischer Republikaner). It is in
this very same spirit that Paul Virilio saw his words translated into a wonderfully aphoristic
set of projections by Magdalena Jetelova60. Despite some differences (Jetelova’s projections
would circulate mainly as a set of black-and-white photographs), Lejman is part of this
tradition, and works such as BREATHING CATHEDRAL (2005) or, even more
prominently, 60’S CATHEDRAL (2011), just go all the way when it comes to search the

60 In the Project Atlantic Wall, concrete bunkers on the Jutland coast – relics of Germany's defence strategy of the second
world war – became the surface on which lasers were projected onto by the artist. The short textual phrases were quoted
from French philosopher Paul Virilio's book Bunker Archaeology. Unlike Lejman (a Painter) Jetelova (a Sculptor) chooses
not to allow the structures' architectural features to interfere with her work, shooting them from angles which understate
their form, presenting them as ugly concrete lumps and thus enhancing their oppressive stature. […] There is only one
exception to this, in which the bunker fills the frame and its architectural reference is of significance. The stage-like
construction contains the phrase Absolute War Becomes Theatrality (sic). In:
http://www.source.ie/issues/issues0120/issue15/is15revatlwal.html

36
canvas of cultural forms (in both of these cases, symptomatically, the cathedral as symbol of
the Sacred61).

Western Painting exchanged the icon for the scene, the truth for ideas (Sloterdijk: 156) – a
drift from the religious to the political? Lejman is possibly a novel approach of an ongoing
project, to unite the principles of research and illumination (Sloterdijk: 156), in a
commitment to the very tradition of Painting which won’t stop at Painting’s commonplaces.
States Sloterdijk: Along its own line, the history the Modern Age’s great art became a torch
relay of vitalization for our views of the existent through the medium of elevated scenes.
(Sloterdijk: 159) I would then risk one more idea, Lejman’s art not only elevates the Huan
encounter with the Ins, but it also elevates the very stance of art’s semblance, within an
alwaysemerging public space spherology. (Is this why Alina’s womb, bearing all the weight
of the game of words of its title, has been installed at the elevator?)

For, to put it in still other words, the medium of Painting is much more than the traditional
optical tools used to frame reality; for Vidal, Painting may be visualized only in the moment
of the complete invisualization of its medium. The way Lejman creates life – Human Life as
the matricial co-presence in the Urban Fabric – denounces the praxis of a special kind of
Demiurge. His projections are always (apparently, at first) intentionally eerie,
phantasmagorical, deceptive, or simply unpleasant62, at least those numbed picture gazers

So I’d conclude that Lejman Painting is about recovering the polity of a trans-visual potestas
which is currently most compelling when we think of the socio-cultural cul-de-sacs families,
society, cities, nations are immerged in. A sort of step forward toward a nu-social realism,
these projections work simultaneously like an emotional elegy and the joyful exploration of a
critical apparatus, for their aphoristic take on the haptic and vice versa, their haptic take on
the aphorism – are exceptionally prone to the spectator’s engagement and participation –
what Massumi calls reattuning, and reindividualizing (Massumi :115) – without for single
moment to express this in words that would transfer them into manifests. So, maybe an

61 The concept of the cathedral is important for me insofar as, especially in the latter work [60s CATHEDRAL], it pertains
to reflection on the durability of certain kinds of symbols, constructs and ideologies, of culture itself; and also of
interpersonal relations. From the point of view of today’s world, perhaps this momentary, intense and direct contact
between the 32 people is trued and perhaps more lasting than monuments built throughout the centuries. […] Sometimes,
it’s worth reflecting on the “cathedrals” that emerge just for seconds. (Lejman: 23)
62 Since, as the artist puts, he is interested in the human condition with all its ballasts, complications, burdens, for which

there are of course some autobiographical reasons. (Lejman: 17)

37
emmerging (a)polity is finding a way to become just invisible enough to make itself appear as
a fundamental cognitive and emotional stance of Human spectatorship. Because, as we’re
reminded by Contemporary rhetorician Daniel M. Gross Passion, in other words, is a
function of publicity. (Gross: 174)

Epilogue (a shimmering sum-up)

For Peter Sloterdijk, Conventional reality is made of ghost lights that appear to them in the form of
names, identities and business. In this sense, Dominik Lejman’s visual territory reveals a sense of
purpose: in the forefront, the artwork interprets and overcomes the tension between picture (a
poor, alienating, trivial visual occurrence) and Image (a complex expression of the
entanglement of theme, medium and situation). If the apparata of Photography and
Impressionism once opened up a new world of/to images, like before the invention of
perspective, Lejman stands today for an exceptional research into uncharted dimensions of
visual experience. These situated images – in fact, the whole reality as an image – dwell in
the creative tension field established between an immanent critique of ideology and art-
driven counterhegemony.

The image appears and then disappears. The loop reveals a strategical limit. The negative and
the pale define an impossible silhouette. The surface is felt. In front of Lejman’s projection
pieces, Cinematic impulse leads to a grammatic diagram of images, challenging the viewer
not only to experience but to perform the gaze. In this aesthetic processuality, similarities
with textuality may be highlighted: Lejman ‘teaches’ us to unwork images. Is there autonomy
without one’s work on (visual) meaning? Lejman is in addition a cartographer of Human
facts urging to be tackled by a critically public art and where trivial meanings are suspended
for just enough time for their virtuality to be… experienced. Eventful co-presences, always
taking their time. It is a participatory visualisation of sorts. The staging of the image. His
painting tools – the choice of surfaces and contexts (already a part of the game), the decisions
about how light and image shall co-opt the cinematic experience – are just effective enough
to generate a sense of co-presence and of a rigorous heightening of attention (Plath: 346).
Elevations. The author is very careful not to over-aestheticize the reception of the works by
the viewer, which explains their non-authoritative, but rather seductive character, their subtle
dignity. The co-presence of the public is something he orchestrates by means of very precise

38
timecode devices (within which the loop is of core importance). The image appears and then
disappears. Memories come and come again, as if instruments of sensitivity. The haptic
affirms itself as lived aphorism.

Endnote

This is the second text written under the research concept PART – Performing Art Research
Totality.

39
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