W-WA – Maurycy Gomulicki | #photography & visual arts

Maurycy Gomulicki is an eccentric artist: a hunter and collector of aesthetic and pop cultural phenomena, a resident of faraway Mexico, yet at the same time a patriotic Varsovian who always fondly returns to his hometown.

W-WA is a certain confession of the author stemming from a family of prominent Warsaw history experts. He dedicated the book to his grandfather, Juliusz Wiktor Gomulicki, thus making a conscious step towards entering into the Warsaw mythology that reaches back to the 19^th-century literary tradition. That Warsaw was a city of perspectives and wide shots, while Gomulicki tends to focus on detail, photographing pavements, parapets, concrete flower-beds, and manholes. His W-WA is an attempt at renewing Varsovian patriotism, based on a new aesthetic code, representative of the 1970s-born generation. It is one of the first publications to openly affirm the birth of the modernist, but most of all social modernist nostalgia; a specific, sentimental ABC of local close-ups of a “broken up city”, to borrow Piotr Rypson's expression from the afterword.

W-WA is at the same time a type of a contemporary passage carried out by the Warsaw flaneur, known for the legendary strolls he took with his friends across the housing estates and post-industrial outskirts of the city. W-WA is an askance glance, a documentation of the margins, but despite repeating motifs (benches, drains, curbs, cement flower pots, gratings, etc.) it is not an ordinary typology, but rather an intuitive accumulation of aesthetic artifacts that is characteristic of Gomulicki. The whole is not ruled by a system, but by awe at its details. The book unveils a somewhat unexpected image of the city, questioning its monumental identity, also, however, devoid of people.

W-WA by Maurycy Gomulicki – Image Gallery

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Gomulicki's photographs clearly refer to the tradition of modernist photography, which sought visual expression in the texture of cobblestones, rhythmical building facades, and geometric architectural structures. Several decades later, Gomulicki tracks down these typical themes, capturing them in the state of being organically damaged, overgrown with wild plants. He documents the natural process of entropy impacting the newest history of the city with affection that is characteristic of the archaeologists of modernity.

The book's structure is very simple. The photographs are imposed with bleed, preserving the original proportions of the 35mm film used by Gomulicki. The artist also demonstrates a certain arrogance by introducing crude, straightforward frames, as well as by bounding his book in a raw, cheap paperback. The typography on the cover and on title pages is coloured pink – a specific trademark of the artist, who devotes a large portion of his practice to the study of the cultural and erotic potential of this colour (see his blog pinknotdead.blox.pl). This distance towards the professional routine and its particular frivolousness turn W-WA into a book that matches the times of the reviving culture of the city and new aesthetic intuitions and fascinations, but it is also a work bearing more gravity than it would seem at first sight. It is a book about the identity of a city, a foundation for a new reading of Warsaw, powered by aesthetic nostalgia for the childhood spent in the Polish People's Republic. This “twisted aesthetics”, writes Rypson, still hide the memory of the war. The urban jungle according to Maurycy Gomulicki takes the form of Eros and Tanathos.