Pozytywny negatyw, negatywny pozytyw | Positive negative, negative positive

In his work, Waldemar Wojciechowski (1958-) uses many means of expression - painting, photography, object and installation art, as well as plein air activities. His work is characterised by intellectual curiosity, which, combined with the artist's anarchic attitude and brilliant sense of humour, results in surprising works. Wojciechowski plays with ambiguities of meaning, breaks logical rules and exposes colloquial ways of thinking and talking about the world. The artist reveals the arbitrariness of seemingly obvious concepts and the relationships between them, tracks down ambiguities and analyses the paradoxes inherent in reality and the linguistic structures we create to represent and describe it. The paradoxes visualised by Wojciechowski are the result of his passion for thinking and his attempts to discover a different structure of phenomena with their alternative meanings. In the case of the photographic diptych Positive Negative, Negative Positive (2012), Wojciechowski also reaches for the paradox of the inversion of meanings and a deliberate disruption of trained ways of perceiving the world. Here we are moving in a complicated system of references, balancing between the notions of positive and negative, referring to the technique of analogue photography and the evaluative meanings of these notions, reinforced by the symbolic meanings of black and white. Wojciechowski's work provokes consternation; the artist turns our cognitive habits upside down, just as the colours on a negative film are reversed. Magdalena Lewoc