Dominik Lejman | Timothy Persons
 
 "People see only that which is gone and which is no more. They never see that which is already here but invisible.”  
 
Dominik Lejman works in the same manner as a magician does when daring us to see the invisible. The raw material for his work ranges from the obvious to the everyday life patterns we so readily take for granted. Lejman doesn’t use any tricks or sleight of hand to make his point. Instead, he opens our imagination as if it was indeed our eyes, helping us find new ways to interpret the world we move in. A good example of this occurs in his two video works, Running Track (2005) and Skaters (2003). In Running Track Lejman begins with the naked body of a man running on a treadmill. Viewed from above we only see an obscure vision of the man, who slowly dresses in black clothes and then disappears altogether. Combined with the movement of the treadmill, the object seems to merely float in space. Simple yet surreal, the video has the feel and sensibility of an echo with a memory that can find its way home to its source.
With the same touch but a different approach, in his video Skaters Lejman questions how we interpret our individuality. By recording people ice skating in a public rink, he focuses on the patterns of their movement instead of any individual characteristics. To do this Lejman reduces the figures to white silhouettes, each defined only by the direction they move in; size and speed are the keys as opposed to age, sex, or race. The question is how much of life do we fail to acknowledge because we lose it in the pale shadows that rest outside the colors we hope to see.
Dominik Lejman has built his career around questioning the parameters of the various media he is working in. Since his graduation as a painter from the Royal College of Art in London in 1995, Lejman has been one of the leading artists of his generation to challenge and create a new media art form based on the blending of painting and technology. Beginning in 1998 with the series Powerprayer (I, II, III) Lejman began to mix the discipline of painting with his video recordings to introduce a new dialogue in how to perceive. This merging provokes and confronts our prejudices of what we think a painting should be in the same manner as the Suprematists did in using collage as a technique to defy the boundaries of their generation’s assumptions of what a painting was. Lejman’s ventures into these new avenues of expression were unique at this time as he was using painting more as a conceptual tool than as an object confined by its discipline. This reminds me of John Baldessari’s Commissioned Paintings series (1969), where he used other people to paint his ideas. The emphasis was built around the concept of what a painting isn’t, rather than what it is. Lejman in the same way uses the means of the act of making to open a conversation on where a painting can go by challenging its validity as an art form. Lejman in turn uses his videos to entrap moments in time—space differentials. He creates a new forum for dialogue by intertwining these projected images with the painted surface of the canvas so that they may act as a vehicle for his ideas.
This comparison to Baldessari grows in Lejman’s work Yo Lo Vi (2006). Inspired by Francisco de Goya’s The Inquisition Tribunal (1812–1819), Lejman injects the use of a time lapse (as Baldessari did in his later works), drawing the public into the visual picture a few seconds after they have entered the room to view it. By using a staged image that refers to the atrocities that occurred at Guantamamo Bay, Lejman forces us to confront social injustices by introducing the audience as part of the inquisition jury.
In the work Guggenbubble (2010), this interaction produces a translucent-like sensation where the video recordings seem to dance just under the brush strokes of the painting, heightening the tension between the two until the object feels alive. His use of light and movement remind me of the new media pioneer Jim Campbell whose innovation in electronic art has set the tone for this century’s new media discoveries. Lejman wants his presentations to be viewed in natural light so that we can experience another dimension outside of the black box and fully absorb the encounter in real time. His multi-layered configurations move the passage of time by altering the depth of space from which they were initially recorded. These fusions work together to push our presumptions of truth much like Plato’s analogy in the allegory of the cave where reality is merely an illusion, a shadow of what the truth may look like. In a sense Lejman decodes our presence through the patterns we leave in the spaces in which we move. He fuses these images together to project the fantasies embedded in our subconscious. Dominik Lejman’s works create their own somnambulistic language, a conceptual dream-walk through a non-definable space.