Presence

What does “presence” mean in a world dominated by the ephemeral and the digital? And have we come to mistake it for mere visibility? This question has recurred throughout Dominik Lejman’s practice for nearly three decades. 

The artist explores it by expanding the boundaries of painting, bringing together the material structure of the painted surface with the ephemeral nature of projection—the light of moving images hovering at the threshold of visibility. He creates works that are not self-contained representations but situations unfolding in time. Projection does not negate painting; rather, it reveals its successive layers, making its presence perceptible through what is incomplete, fleeting, and displaced. 

Anamorphic distortions of pictorial proportion, together with the interplay of light, materiality, and the viewer’s angle of vision, transform the spectator from a passive observer into an integral participant in the experience. Each work establishes its own autonomous mode of existence through a unique temporal structure. The exhibition as a whole generates meaning through the tension between these independent works. 

Lejman’s paintings slow down the act of looking. They resist the immediacy of contemporary experience, replacing it with an experience of presence—of participating in the time of the image.