Wojciech Kotlewski's creation is marked by a trait of pilgrimage. His wanderings are not only journeys to sanctuaries, holy places, but also heading for places touched by history and the national tradition, making dreams about reaching famous culturally significant points on the map or even exotic lands come true. In this painting the topos of the road is realized at two levels. First of all it is documentation of visits to some locations, stays in some important commemoration places and at the same time the simplest and cogent depiction of the metaphor of existence which says that 'human life is just ajourney'.

The motive of the road, travelling is very common in art, it often appears in literaturę or film, especially when it is possible to emphasize getting about in time and space, to introduce a storyline, where the lapse of time results in changes in the world and in life. On the other hand the actual journey is the materiał aspect of the road, it is the crunch of stones under our boots, footprints left by a pilgrim. It is so difficult to express all these aspects in painting, on the plan of a merely two-dimensional image.

Thus Kotlewski's artistic and philosophical reflection should be treated outright: considering a complete character of the message the painting is enriched with materiał traces of places, with his and other people's memories, with drafts, notes and inscriptions. Only then it is possible to fully comprehend fate and history, whose traces are left in the form of painted images of walls, generation-trodded roads, backwoods. Herę we could recall the fact that naturę, man's surrounding is very often the theme of painting. However, though its elements are usually presented in art from the 'ecological' perspective, it is first of all history that is present in Wojciech Kotlewski's work.

The collection of stones brought from religious sanctuaries or from homeland are certainly souvenirs of visiting these places by contemporary people, by the artist himself or his friends, yet at the subsequent level they are also traces of life and fate of other people, sometimes from the remote past, hints of those who built Roman temples, as in Wąchock (where a gmerk of a medieval master, a testimony to his presence was preserved on the stone wali), traces of those who raised castles, like in Mirów in the area of Jura, of those who walked in processions alongthe Royal Route in Cracow and finally those who tooktheirlastjoumey, tapping the rhythm withtheir wooden clogs on the Oświęcim cobblestones.

Today old cobblestones are replaced by new ones, or - just in an act of thrift - they are substituted by a surface taken from other places, demolishing vicissitudes of history preserved in a stone. The surface of Dolna Street in Łódź, where Litzmanstadt Ghetto started, is covered with asphalt. After removing the old stones, the courtyard of Jasna Góra in Częstochowa was covered with stones taken from the modernized Alley of... Lenin. The examples of history paradoxes. If the stones could speak, they would probably be able to laugh and ery. The artist is also concemed about the fact of removing the age-old coating covering historical walls, depriving them of their original historical epidermis. Sand blasting of stone facades of cathedrals is a irretrievable destruetion of layers conveying the memory of the past, efficient like washing out emulsion from a photographic plate.

Kotlewski is interested in stones, first of all those old and damaged, already marked by traces of human arduousness, emotions, hopes and suffering (like in the epitaph dedicated to those who died of cholera), cobblestones trodden by royal retinues or walls touched by millions of avarege people for ages. Stones are for the artist like silent witnesses of historical events and human experience. A variety of stone remnants, both those realistic, picked up from the road, and those painted, is a reflection of the variety of historical event and traditions. Kotlewski is concemed with other natural contexts. An inconspicuous fragment of a landscape depicted in a painting is a memory of the AK soldiers, a portrait of their real forest base-shelter, unluckily not effective enough. Today it is recognized, associated with memories of those who still remember it, swelling with human life stories again. In Wojciech Kotlewski's painting there is a lot of exaltation, reflection on the meanders of history, on human generosity and meanness, so rare today. Roads, monastery yards or walls of churches can not be collected, but they can be repainted, centimetre by centimetre, with an attempt to reveal the fart that they are worn out and old, to portray them in the way people are portrayed. Beside their documentary and emotional value, the images certainly represent the aesthetic value. Their colour, light and texture somehow become a reflection of different aspects of life.

Some of the works get close in their chararter to abstrart compositions when they repeat, which seems to be obvious, the motives of brick constructions or the rhythms of cobblestones madę of blocks. In Kotlewski's work portraits of people become a separate value -there are family members, friends, celebrities. There is a quite big gallery of contemporary people who are referred to by the artists in his reflection conceming the time we live in. There are many works which were created under specific circumstances, crucial for the artist's pesonal life. Last by not least they are still lives in Kotlewski's work which take part in exposing the particular relation between man and his time. The representational components of such paintings are selected not only with regard to a variety of shapes, colours and textures. What is most significant for the artist is the character of selected props which become signs of the time they represent. The author paints still lives which define latest decades as an era of objects, synonyms of progress and comfort as well as their consumption, as the time of media and lack of direct contact in people's relations. Kotlewski's painting is absolutely realistic, not only conceming the way of reproducing reality, but also because the artist transfers original objects from his surrounding, he records visits in some realistic existing places. The creator explicitly indicates the tradition which his art originates from. It is the tradition of realistic painting of the second half of the 19th century. In some landscapes and portraits the influence of Post-lmpressionist colourism can be observed.

A stone, which lasts longerthan a human life, patiently preserves both joyful and painful memory about generations. The facture of our life stories is usually as rough as the surface of old cobblestones and walls, like furrows on the portrayed faces. Wojciech Kotlewski paints his images with a great respect for the past. Therefore even the most banał components of reality are not copied like an average landscape or a still life are painted. He paints them the way some urgent documents are written down

Dariusz Leśnikowski

Transl. Elżbieta Rodzeń-Leśnikowska