“Residency: The Wall”
The history of one of the walls at S35 Gallery can be read as a “pentimento”, a trace of an earlier version of a painting. It is a past seen through what came after.
Even before the gallery was established, several layers of plaster and paint were removed from the walls of the space, revealing the interior’s original painted decoration. For the next year and a half, the wall accompanied the exhibitions and gradually became an informal visual signature of the space. Then, due to the requirements of one of the exhibitions, it was painted over. Initially, this gesture was purely technical. It was intended to restore the wall to its function as a neutral background for art. Over time, however, it became clear that this neutrality was only apparent. The ornament had ceased to be merely an element of the building’s former architecture.
This raises the question: where does an image reside after it has been painted over? Does it disappear together with the material surface on which it was once visible?
Aby Warburg described a similar capacity of images to transcend their own time as “Nachleben”, a survival, or afterlife, beyond life. Images can disappear and return, moving between eras, media, and contexts. Yet they do not return in an unchanged form. Each reappearance is also a transformation.
Paulina Semkowicz’s intervention is therefore not an attempt to reconstruct the lost ornament. The artist neither restores the wall to its previous state nor invalidates the decision to paint it over. Working from documentation, the history of the interior, and her own painterly language, she creates another incarnation of the image.
What did the image want from the painted-over wall?
Semkowicz’s work is an image, but also an image about the fate of other images: about their making, erasure, and return.
“Pentimento” does not turn back time. It does not reveal the original painting as it existed before the transformation. It merely allows us to perceive that beneath every present surface lie earlier decisions, and that different times meet there: the history of the building, the beginnings of the gallery, the moment when the wall was painted over, and the artist’s intervention in the present.
by Kuba Szkudlarek