David Wojtowycz creates posters, watercolors, sculptures, and installations that evoke an abysmal, highly stylized parallel world imbued with death, sex, bodily fetish, and Hollywood myth. Some of his key motifs are the doppelganger theme, mirror reflections, and the merging of image and likeness. In his painted and digital works, Wojtowycz usually includes an imaginary middle line that confronts the motif with its reflection and, in a kind of autoerotic act, creates new, imaginary meaning. Gay porno magazines from the ’70s and ’80s, film posters, magazine images, and trailers of old black and white movies are appropriated to generate products that are even more glamorous, pornographic, artistic, emotional, and idealistic than the originals. Through the reflections of bodies, lines of text, logos, and architecture, hybrid images arise that conjure up imprecise memories, emotions, fears, and longing. The patina of Wojtowycz’s watercolors, which are painted on aged and foxed paper, is as artificial and staged as the culture they archive. His retro-aesthetic posters resemble ads for cult movies that were never filmed-and serve as surrogates for an imaginary, excessive life that has only taken place in its own reproduction.
Wojtowycz creates environments for this unlived, distant life; stage-like conglomerates somewhere between club, living room, gallery, and bar for a performance whose main character, a cross between actor, director, artist, gallerist, and archivist, remains absent. Paintings that could be on loan from collectors can be seen alongside posters, which for their part could just as easily have been made by filmmakers as by movie fans. Speakers are sometimes built into the walls and objects and provide the soundtrack to the scene. Wojtowycz’s environments are inspired by film sets, window displays, and magazine interiors and also recalls sources in contemporary art such as the installations of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.
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