November (A Hunger for Faith)

In both his early photo-installations and his later photographic works, Jarosław Bartołowicz has consistently focused on the analysis of the inner world of a human being. His artistic stance, resulting in a discreetly understated, metaphysical reflection on human condition, developed in the milieu of the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk at the same period as the radical programmes of its current teachers (e.g. Grzegorz Klaman), which centre on, among others, the analysis of aspects of corporeality and criticism of various social phenomena emerging in Polish reality. Of these two paths springing from a single source, which is the focus on the human being, Bartołowicz chose the path of contemplating the psyche, unceasingly searching for identity and attempting to find a bearing not so much in external reality as in the inner world.

November (A Hunger for Faith) is one of Bartołowicz’s many large-format works constructed of several elements isolated by frames. The represented world is reduced to an unavoidable minimum; its perfectly thought-out elements are brought together so as to reinforce the asceticism of an undefined interior that provides the setting for the scene. The photographs’ power of expression lies in their life-size scale, austere colour range extending from white through grey to black, and above all in the composition based on a severe contrast between the empty, anonymous space and the figure of a man sitting at the table.

Bartołowicz’s protagonist, embodied by the artist himself, is an alienated man, avoiding eye contact, as if separated from the viewer by a transparent yet impassable glass wall. The title of the photograph, November (A Hunger for Faith), aptly conveys both the nostalgic aura of this work and the mental state of the protagonist. November, as Bartołowicz once observed, is “the cruellest, and the hardest to survive, of all the months in the year”. Associated with emptiness, death, suspension and morbid melancholy, it is particularly conducive to reflection. A part of the title, A Hunger for Faith, as well as the light which the sitting man is cradling in his hands, seem to suggest that his contemplation is focused on the Absolute, the Higher Being, God. Hungering for faith means also wishing to find a firm foundation point, to define oneself in reference to religion, and to discover the meaning of life in both the earthly and the eternal perspective. The work by Bartołowicz, a subtle and intricately constructed psychological (self-) portrait, shows the human being’s inner struggle by means of silence, restraint and an emptiness that is full of tension.

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translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz