Filmoteka Muzeum

Szczerbowski’s practice in the field of moving image continues threads which were present earlier in painting. Abstraction oriented towards compiling, reshaping and experiencing the found visual data (reference to works from the series Fractal Images), is set here in motion. Motion Pictures is a moving micro-collage. The launched visual painting projects employ, and thereby accentuate, the specific character and essence of the digital image. This operation stresses in a certain way the sense of the definition of the medium of film as the art of moving image.

In terms of its structure, Motion Pictures resembles a found footage board divided into tiny, pulsating mini-squares. The surface of the cinema screen is composed of a multitude of vibrating, shapely mini-monitors. Entrance into the structure of the very film image, into the world of pixels, allows to recognise its form and structure, as it is also the case in Multikino. Notoriously pulsating, restless, monochrome or colour (Motion Pictures has both a colour and monochrome version), they create a moving collage. The impression of visual stimuli introduces reflection on the ontology of the digital image.

Motion Pictures operates primarily with its concept, and relies on chance, on performance rather than on the conscious, creative world of the artist. Play on the structure of the digital image, watched as if under the microscope, resembles observations generated by the image technique, a contemporary version of pointillism – digital pointilism.

References: A. Hirszfeld, Szczerbowskiego obraz zwielokrotniony, [in:] Wizje i Re-wizje. Wielka Księga estetyki w Polsce, Cracow 2007; A. Hirszfeld, Robert Szczerbowski, [in:] New Phenomena in Polish Art after 2000, Warsaw 2007.
 

(AH)