Bartosz Czarnecki

Even though I am a traditionalist in my technique, I have never been against the efforts that artists make to keep up with new technologies. Science has given and continues to give us new tools to look at the world. Painting gave way to photography, photography gave way to film works, and finally film works gave way to digital graphics.

In all this, a paradox occurred: the medium began to be presented within another medium. Paintings began to appear in photographs, films, and finally on the web. Today, it is enough to open a painting album or a web browser to be able to study old masters, paintings in terms of history, ideas, creative process, and painting techniques. On the one hand, it brings us closer to the work of art, making it democratic and accessible to everyone, but on the other hand, to quote Hans Belting, “technical media are increasingly usurping the function of perception today." In simple layman's terms, a person gives up faith in his own senses in favour of trusting the reliability of technology.

Let's take, for example, the most famous portrait of Louis XIV by Rigaud Hyacinthe. To admire the artwork on the web, someone first had to take a photo of it. At this stage, we must already consider all the variables, such as the light, the angle of the shot, and the capabilities of the photographer's equipment. This photo, with all its errors, ends up on the computer. This is where the real poetry begins. An image becomes a collection of pixels, each pixel a collection of colours, each colour a binary value, and each binary value a sequence of electrical impulses. Therefore, the greatest works of art we see on the Internet are nothing more than a collection of zeros and ones reaching tens of thousands of characters. They become a mathematical code rather than a proper portrait of the Sun King. So, one error in photography, code, or monitor quality is enough to create hundreds of versions of one image for the "visual prosthesis" to set an impassable boundary between the reproduced idea of a thing and the original thing itself.

When I create "reproductions" while suffering from tennis elbow, I know I'm painting only or insomuch in coded binary strings. These reproductions may ultimately resemble a portrait of Louis XIV, but they are basically just a representation of intricate coded numbers, pixels, and images that exist in and of themselves as a new version of the original entity.

To illustrate my considerations, below I present to you a fragment of Rigaud Hyacinthe's great work:

1010100 00010011 10010001 11000011 01000010 10000110 10000010 10000000 00000000 00000000 00000011 01010010 01010010 00010001 00010100 10000000 00000000 00000000 00000101 00000000 00000000 01010100 00101010 01000010 00000000 10000000 00000000 00000000 00010010 11110000 00011000 11110110 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000010 01011100 00010010 00010110 01011100 11000000 00000000 00000011 10110001 00000000 00000000 00000011 10110001 00000000 01100101 01001010 11000011 10000110 11000000 00000000 00001000 00000000 00010010 01010001 00010000 01010101 00011110 00100111 00111011 00110111 01110110 11100110 10011010 11110010 10000000 10000001 10010100 00101111 01101111 11111101 01111111 10101011 11011011 00010111 11001001 00001100 11000100 01010010 10100111 01000101 00000010 10011000 11010111 00101011 00110101 01101100 11010110 11001000 01100010 01010100 00101111 11001110 10000110 00000001 10000000 00000000 00111000 00001010 01110001 10011100 01110111 00010110 10011011 00000111 00110001 11110010 10101101 01110101 00011011 11000100 11000000 00000000 00100110 00010100 00010110 01001011 10001101 11000010 11001100 10111111 01101111 11100001 01111000 11001111 11110000 01001111 11000001 01000101 11001111 10011001 00101111 11000000 00000000 00111000 00111010 10001011 10010111 11011101 11101011 10101010 11111111 11111111 11011111 01000010 10110011 11111111 11111100 00111101 11110101 11011000 00101001 11011010 10111001 00101111 00100010 10101111 11110101 11011100 10011010 11001110 11111110 01010110 10110001 01111010 11101011 11110100 11110101 01100111 01111101 11101000 10000000 00000000 00111000 00010110 00100101 01001101 01110111 11011101 11111101 01111110 01000001 10101011 01000010 11101001 01111110 11110111 11011000 01001101 00000010 10111110 10111011 00111000 00001110 11111101 01011001 00100101 10111110 01111110 11111110 11100110 11010001 01101000 11101010 11011111 11110000 00000000 00000000 00101100 00101111 11100111 11001101 10100001 10110011 10101000 10110000 01010111 10111111 10001111 10000011 01001011 00101100 11110011 00110100 00110110 01111010 11101011 11010011 11001101 00101100 10000100 00000000 00000000 00000101 00111110 10011001 10100000 01110111 01000000 11010100 10001101 11111101 01111101 01110000 00011010 11011111 10111111 11111000 01100111 00011010 00010101 00001101 00100001 10101010 00011000 00101001 01100110 11011101 10000010 10000000 00000000 00100111 10111001 01001001 11000010 11111011 00001110 11010001 00101001 01110011 11110010 10111110 10011010 11101011 11001010 10101110 11000101 01111011 10111110 11100100 10111110 10011111 00110000 11000000 00000000 00111000 00100101 10111001 10111110 01111001 11101011 …