FOR A MOMENT I HAD EVERYTHING

TEXT BY ADAM MAZUR, CURATOR

For a moment, I have everything. A table by the bed with a mug on it. Everything is in place.  At a particular moment the mug moves precariously, dangerously. This must be preserved because the end is near. This is the beginning of the art of photography, and also a starting point for Prot Jarnuszkiewicz: a fundamental impulse followed by the awareness that everything  is meaningless anyway. The subject is broken, as in a self-portrait in the mirror, while the message is vague, full of understatements, places that we fill with ourselves and our own imagination, our own interpretation. If it is a painting, it is foggy, indistinct. If it is a monument, it is without a legible inscription. If it is a building, it is only a part of it: ceiling, corridor, wall, window. If it is a city, it is a lawn, road lane, pavement. There is no typology in this series, and the structure of the image seems to be a derivative of caprice and necessity. It is known that the series was created over a period of two and a half years: in the years 2017–2019. It is difficult to recognise and locate the photographed space. Spatial arrangements seem universal, although nature points to the Old Continent. What we see could have happened in Stuttgart, in Florence or in Warsaw (the latter was the case, as the artist says). It could be a topographic record. There are, however, impressions, traces of events, anti-photographs reminiscent of notations made casually with a phone. Travelling around Europe, Prot Jarnuszkiewicz travels deep into his self. This visual experience has primarily an original and even personal dimension. The story could be dramatic. It would include emptiness, sadness and melancholy. However, we do not have full access to this particular story. 

Although it is limited, the equivalents presented resonate and arouse similar emotions. Apart from one self-portrait, there are practically no people in Prot Jarnuszkiewicz’s pictures. The photographer’s shadow appears once. Once – a group seen from above, as if the artist levitated over them, hovered slightly and watched them from a distance. There are no people, there are traces of them that highlight their absence. It is like the biblical end of days, the day of judgment, when everyone has left in fear and only the photographer has stayed to collect trivial impressions, note the view of the world and then plunge into nothingness. 

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Prot Jarnuszkiewicz approaches from the very beginnings of photography. The daguerreotypes of empty streets – empty because of the exposure time, of still lifes and landscapes, surprising because of their clumsiness. Artistic reflection on the art of photography never ends and does not consist solely in searching for a mythical artistic beginning. The artist must be aware of the history and all those who worked before him and alongside him to come closer to the essence of the photographic record. Jarnuszkiewicz’s observations include something of the great elementarist tradition. Josef Sudek’s window sill, window, and vase. Jan Svoboda’s pears on the table and bread. The floor and wall of Mikołaj Smoczyński’s studio. This is the modernist tradition. Mindfulness training imposed by Edward Weston, and earlier, before modernism, hiding somewhere behind the trees and doors in the photographs of Henry Fox Talbot. 

In turn, the urinal returning in the pictures refers to Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Stieglitz. Jarnuszkiewicz also presents images found and recalled in advance, rather awaiting a photographer somewhere than actually created by him. The world is open to a careful and sensitive photographer. The blur typical of the Polaroid I-1, which is considered a classic, brings Jarnuszkiewicz closer to pioneers, but also prompts reflection on the pictorial qualities of this series of pictures. The broken perspective, foreshortenings and close-ups, recessions and sharp angles of Jarnuszkiewicz’s lens break down the academism of pictorialists, whether native like Jan Bułhak and Henryk Mikolasch, or foreign like Edward Steichen (before he became a follower of cool modernism). Photographs by Prot Jarnuszkiewicz are lyrical. They are not about pathos, however, but about authenticity, emotions and reflections on the passing of time. It is a lyricism far removed from sentimentalism. It is definitely new-wave in form (his polaroids are reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie and Chris Marker’s La Jetee). There is room for delight and beauty in these pictures. Twinkling, squinting, looking towards the sun as in an image in which the light entering the lens creates an unusual, abstract aura. Jarnuszkiewicz is interested in error, refraction of light and obliques, which have their own aesthetics. This is part of the identity of the polaroid. which is unpredictable, chimerical and makes the photographer humble. The light reflecting on the wall is out of focus (it’s not Minor White). The pictures seem too dark, too bright, but they are always beautiful. 

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It is amazing how engaging the details of concrete and steel can be, massive yet small structures, and – on the contrary –  completely tiny ones, which thanks to the optical illusion seem large, even huge. A tiny deck chair set up in the park. A monumental pile of wood spread out on the table like a monument. Such a loss of proportion and disturbance of thep framework of perception fascinate Prot Jarnuszkiewcz. The tension between the micro and the macro is also present in the prints presented at the exhibition, where the artist does not show polaroids, but only blow-ups. Some may even have the form of a polaroid, refer to the original, but it is only used to create a counterpoint for scaled pictures, the largest of which are three by three meters. However, this is not a collection of individual, crumbling and almost abstract pictures that differ in terms of their dimensions. Subsequent polaroids form a story. Rather more of a journey than a walk. The photographer seems to be  dreaming, or maybe on drugs? Intoxicated by the moment, unstable and emotionally hypersensitive. Go, look and take pictures is the usual motto of street photography. Jarnuszkiewicz, however, is not interested in street noise, the crowd and its gestures, situations, stories. This journey is neither strolling nor drifting. There is no snobbery here, but rather a desire to understand what this is all about. The exhibition, but also the book, closely resemble a polaroid: they allow you to feel and be in the space (entering the picture?). Polaroids taken by Jarnuszkiewicz – although the artist used an iPhone application coupled with a camera – are neither cropped nor manipulated in post-production. The characteristic defects of the polaroid picture emphasise their raw beauty and materiality. In this way, the polaroid itself becomes an object, the only and unique artefact. In place of the disappearing perfectly transparent quality of photography, the painterly structure of the picture appears, transferring the viewer into a different state of feeling. This singularity and uniqueness of each polaroid picture also allows comparison with daguerreotype and artistic techniques which have nothing to do with modern digital photography o. In this way, Prot Jarnuszkiewicz settles accounts with the old technique.

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So what is all this photography for? Moving from picture to picture, carried away by the narrative created by the insights recorded in the pictures, we orientate ourselves, witnessing an extraordinary process in which pure observation gradually changes in the mental process. The objects seen in the pictures, in the gallery, in the book refer to those encountered by the artist, but their scale in the viewer’s consciousness is completely different, as are the emotions and states they arouse. We rescale objects, change and saturate them with associations, new impressions. The mug so singled out and photographed by the artist becomes an ideal mug whose shape, weight and size grow and change in the viewer’s consciousness. For a moment the mug sitting half on the table and half off it represents all reality, it is the whole world. The room disappears, the scale disappears. Time slows down. The artist manages to create the impression of imposing non-literary importance. Jarnuszkiewicz is not only impressionistic, but also phenomenological in his photographic way. At the same time, however, these pictures are powerful and engaging, elementary – yes, but rather more in a painterly than photographic way, like the observations of Cézanne or constructed impressions of Morandi. For a moment, I have had everything.