Centre for Contemporary Art, Warschau

Norman Leto's exhibition has been built around PHOTON, a new full-length film work by the artist. PHOTON is a project-in-process. Halfway into the creation of the film, Norman Leto creates a form of a spatial trailer of the entire work that is currently being produced. PHOTON's showing is simultaneously an opportunity for the presentation of the creative practices of an author, who is considered to be one of the most innovative and experimentally inclined among Polish contemporary artists.

Norman Leto works at the intersection of visual arts, cinema, philosophy of science, and fiction. He is most famous for his realizations created especially for a virtual environment of digital simulation. Virtual space serves for him as a stage for developing fictional narrations, site of visualizing notions and concepts, territory for speculations on theoretically possible artworks , and finally, realm where artistic omnipotence, unlimited by restrictions of physical reality, can be put into practice.

In Leto's work, digital media do not constitute technological fetishes. It is predominantly a tool – admittedly, the most exposed and the most universal one – but still, one of the many expressive means utilized by an artist in his work. Norman Leto's versatile practice embraces such varied fields of artistic activity as painting, creation of objects, installations and gallery video projections, as well as large-scale narrative forms such as feature film or a novel.

Irrespective of means employed, artist seems to be preoccupied with generating reflections on human condition, which are being put forward in the manner which is not only polemical, but also situated as a sort of an alternative for dominating humanistic tradition. Leto views humankind from the perspective of the hard-boiled sciences: neurology, biochemistry, physics of elementary particles, astronomy. Anthropocentric ethical and moral notions are confronted with an amoral discourse of the natural sciences. Artist looks at art itself, as well as the creative process, from a similar point of view. These problems are interesting for him out of personal, not to say professional, reasons: however, he does not distinguish art and the act of creation among all kinds of different phenomena occurring around us and inside ourselves, both on the micro and macro level.

In 2010, Leto published his philosophical novel "Sailor", at the same time presenting full-length feature film (bearing the same title) that was based on certain motives from the book. "Sailor", which has been made in 90% virtual environment, evades straightforward classifications. Through this medium, artist makes connections between conventions of feature movie, scientific lecture format and formal experiment.

PHOTON is artist's next full-length fictional project after "Sailor". Leto has been working on it for three years, with the completion of the work anticipated for the year 2015.

PHOTON

It is PHOTON that form the axis of the presentation of Norman Leto's work at the Centre of Contemporary Arts Ujazdowski Castle. Exhibition is a presentation of the project-in-process and simultaneously, an act of translation of the chosen sections of this cinematographic undertaking to the language of gallery exposition.

In PHOTON exhibition, Norman Leto negotiates authorial position between the domains of the visual arts and cinema in a manner which should be perceived as characteristic for his working practice so far. He manages to break away from the formal rigours that are operative in the domain of cinema, yet he is also far from following conventions dominating in the area of an institutionalized art. He works according to a different, alternative and transdisciplinary, paradigm. Parallel to that, he retells his movie. He grants audience an access to PHOTON's storyboard – the material which allows us to inspect the creative process itself, the history of constructing respective scenes, introducing alterations and corrections. He selects several sections from movie sequences that have been already realized, presenting them as looped video installations for the gallery. These fragments remain an element of the bigger whole, but they also serve as independent and fully autonomous works of art.

Possible works

PHOTON is also an exhibition of works – sculptures, installations and objects. All of them are located throughout the exhibiting spaces of the Centre of Contemporary Arts Ujazdowski Castle. However, none of them – with one notable exception – are physically present in those spaces. Norman Leto exhibits his works inside the virtual models of the Castle's galleries. These are works of a specific status, with some of them being hardly imaginable to occur in the physical space. Others would turn out to be very expensive in production. Despite that, all of them would be possible in their potentiality. Virtual galleries created by Leto are governed by standard laws of physics. Works, while existing solely in theory, have their own given weight, and the materials which they were made from, are characterized by a specific degree of durability and concrete physical properties. Potential possibility of making Normal Leto's works happen is confirmed by a sculpture that closes the exhibition – Life-history Figure, created on the basis of an algorithm written by the artist, which visualizes human fate as a three-dimensional form.

Exhibition is supplemented by artist's book portfolio, a visual essay documenting path which has led him to PHOTON.

Stach Szabłowski trans. Jacek Staniszewski

Norman Leto (b. 1980) – visual artist, filmmaker as well as writer. His work consists of paintings, objects and installations both in physical space as well as in virtual reality. He works on the borders of narrative fiction, philosophy and science. The artist lives and works in Warsaw.