A PICTURE WITHIN A PICTURE - Jarosław Bartołowicz

“The image in neither nothing, nor all, nor one – it is not even two. Its existence is consistent with the minimum complexity of two viewpoints in collision against the backdrop of a third.”

Georges Didi-Huberman

 

Looking back at Jarek Bartołowicz’s long presence on the Gdańsk scene, several characteristic "reflections" of his artistic attitude catch the eye. Educated to be a painter, he stepped beyond the pictorial plane by mounting objects in a way that would allow the space of presence to extend and encompass the viewer. He experimented with imagining representation of unreality in a real painting through a composition of elements of daily life. According to Rancière, the notion of unrepresentable effects a transformation from representational distance into the impossibility of representation. The many years of Jarek’s struggles with the picture, its extensibility and simultaneous hermeticity, ultimately bound him within the picture and that is where he continues to be, it is only there that can we find him today.

“Every representation of a human being – as a representation of the body – relies on the figure as a phenomenon. It concerns an entity that can only be represented via appearance. It shows what a human being is within the image it allows them to appear in. The image does this by way of a body substitute, staged to provide the required evidence. The body itself is a picture even before it is reproduced in pictures. The picture-reflection is not what it claims to be: a reproduction of the body. In reality, it is the production of a picture of the body. The human-body-image triangle is unbreakable.” /Belting/

Hans Belting speaks of a "binding image," one that gets us stuck in a network of connections and dependencies, unable to traverse the distance of gaze. Jarek understood the paradox of distance which also posed a challenge, an unrelenting involuntary desire to break it. Material objects gradually disappear from his works, the last tangible remains of reality, the author retreats deep into the picture and takes a place in its shadow. Keeping things to a minimum, an aversion to excessive actions, functions, places and obligations – reduction ensues from the awareness of one's own limitations, but it was also a major motivation behind his activity in life; modesty and minimalism constitute a response to existential horror.

Grzegorz Klaman

 

Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, translated by Shane B, Lillis, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 2008.

Hans Belting, An Anthropology of Images. Picture, Medium, Body, translated by Thomas Dunlop, Princeton University Press, Princeton 2011.

Jacques Rancière, The Politics as Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum, London 2011.