15 XI - 7 XII 1996
Sławomir Kubala
Foto © Sławomir Kubala
Foto © Sławomir Kubala
Sławomir Kubala ?!
This is a note I made in my teacher's notebook three years ago when Sławek entered the Photographic workshop of professor Ireneusz Pierzgalski. The question mark and the exclamation mark meant that I had big doubts as to his person. During our first conversation he admitted that he does not know how to work the camera and take a photograph (sic!). Although the Workshop's programme is constructed in such a way that we can teach students photography from the very beginning, but usually our students have some basic knowledge of the subject which they acquired beforehand. Kubala was different because not knowing anything he was willing to work extremely hard and was literally childishly curious as to the mystery of the developing of photographic images. We did not have to wait long for the effects of this curiosity. Even his first pictures showed his individual way of looking at the world through - or rather by means of-a camera. Besides the pictures he had to take at the end of each term he presented us with other sets of photographs that defined the horizon of his interests. Man appeared in these photographs almost from the start. First of flesh and blood, spied on or watched from a close distance, as if he was scanned by the camera lens. Then a man became an obelisk, like a sculpture, seemingly used as an object. And then on his last, tiny pictures a young couple gets lost in space, enters a black hole only to reappear somewhere else. Showing these photographs he admitted that after he had seen a certain exhibition he adopted a visual poetics which, using chemical processes, changes the image of the picture introducing colour or shaping texture and saturation. Such experiments are usually just aesthetic games. But I believe that Slawek manageri to retain in photographs what is, in my opinion, most important -respect for a man entailed in the cover of his own body. Even surface transformations or deformations of shapes only prove that he wants to unveil the mystery of a human figure and stress its emanation by means of shapes and light (both literally and symbolically); it is not an unconscious experiment or currently fashionable visual poetics. Since he was a student at the Academy of Art, where most of the time is devoted to such disciplines as painting or graphic techniques, Kubala tried to mix these techniques with photography. The effects of his efforts are objects built from graphic matrices and prints. These first attempts to get away from a flat image, although they are still crude and smell of aestheticism, not to say showiness, point to a promising future. Because in art nothing regenerates our strength and shows us new roads better than an experiment.
Bearing in mind that when we take the first few steps we tend to stumble one should remember that there are some weak points in Sławek's work. It only goes to show that working hard he is in search of his own language. There is hope to be seen in his intuition and the waking consciousness that the language of photography as a plastic medium is autonomous. Kubala works on a single photograph for a long time and makes it saturated, but not oversaturated. At the same time he points to the mystery of human existence and the world of his objects by means of the subtlety and the concreteness of an image, without forming any clearly defined aesthetic declarations. His current exhibition presents only a part of his work which is quite imposing taking into account that he has been working only for three years. It proves that hard work, technical discipline and talent, as well as (I hope) the experience gained in professor Pierzgalski's workshop, all add up to form an interesting debut.
Finally let me express my sincere hopes that Sławek will find a way and will not succumb to commercial photography which promises more than it gives, taking away precious time from the life of a creative artist.
Konrad Kuzyszyn
Łódź, October l0th,1996.Translation by Maciej Świerkocki
Foto © Sławomir Kubala
Foto © Sławomir Kubala
Sławomir Kubala
Born in Łódź on September 6th,1971.
Studied in the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Łódź between 1992 and 1996.
Copyright ©1996 Sławomir Kubala, Konrad Kuzyszyn, Galeria FF ŁDK
