Magdalena Żołędź: How would you define your theoretical background? How does it influence your work?
Mateusz Sadowski: It depends on current fascinations. I would locate it in certain sections of fiction and popular science publications, rather than in art theory. The influence of these interests (on my work) is indirect. I assume that a work of art can have distinct and peculiar characteristics. I am less concerned with the function of art as a vehicle for concepts taken from other fields. I find individual creative attitudes, along with the unique formal and conceptual experiences they carry, more interesting than cultural trends.
Are you able to name some of the issues around which you create your works?
- I am interested in the figure of the work of art as an autonomous carrier of experiences, emotions and forms, which is untranslatable to other fields. The search for a form that has no chance to exist anywhere else. I have a rather synthetic and rationalizing approach to life and general problems on a daily basis. All the more reason for me to seek reflection in the realm of art. I am not satisfied with both the return to exuberant spirituality and anti-rationalism, and the image of the world reduced to problems that science can address. In this context, art is for me a search for a new form to build a relationship with the complexity of the world.
Would you identify the medium that works best for such explorations? The medium with which you identify most as an artist?
- More recently, it's the medium I use for animated films, which is video, photographic or 3D images processed into a form where I animate them again using stop-frame animation. This complication results in a several-step digital-analog process to the target form. With each film, the method is modified while maintaining its unique style. I find the exploration of this language rewarding and the closest thing to a medium I could identify with.
Are there any themes or topics you like to record the most?
- Every now and then, the fascination of a simple motif comes back to me, which only needs a slight shift to surprise - to shift the experience from the realm of default associations into a broader perspective, into the register of important matters. The use of impromptu motifs is related to the internal contrast of the work. Often, the bigger the overall theme, the minor motif I use to represent it, to avoid kitsch, pomposity, etc.
Could you give an example?
- The first from the shore is photography Half a banana (2014). It's hilarious and nonsensical - it shows a vastly oversized banana sliced into slices that together form the shape of an entire fruit. The joke is that the work shows what the title suggests, only with the palpable inadequacy of that description to the image. The half shows more than the whole. A picture of half of an object contains more information than a representation of that object in its entirety. When you think about it, this is indeed the case. The shell and shape are only part of the representation, which are enough because the object is familiar to us. A cross-section shows more structures, each of which can provide additional subject matter. It's about information in a painting, but also about composition. The world shows itself to us object-wise, thanks to the ways in which we compose its image - from visible elements, words, contexts and our habits about the function of objects. A second example would be a scene from an animation The shape of the moment (2018), which shows tying a shoelace with gloves. This activity is humorous because we can feel (recall) it as tedious and imperfect. The extension of the shot emphasizes this aspect, especially since we are dealing with a tedious animation in which the animator's time and effort were wasted - we feel the inadequacy of the means used to depict a flimsy motif. At the same time, the activity refers to the sphere of forgotten everyday life, as if the technical aspects of functioning in life. This perceived effort of life is existentially deposited into something larger, becomes an example for the entire sphere of activities undertaken on a daily basis, frames the drama of existence, contrasts with the emotions applied to the spheres that we consider important - worthy of emotional elation.
How would you define the camera in your art practice?
- I treat the camera instrumentally, i.e., I use a variety of tools not particularly fussy, from high-quality digital cameras with interchangeable lenses to those built into a phone. Any equipment that can be learned fairly quickly, and well enough to be forgotten about, is suitable for my work. I'm not a hardware person, I'd rather not collect for a new camera. I assume that the one I have, or can rent, is sufficient. With sufficient recognition of its features.
How do you most often start working on a project?
- No matter how much time I spend theoretically identifying the problem that is currently occupying me, the real beginning of the work is always to reach for some kind of practice related to the verification of initial assumptions and ideas. These include drawing, generating technical assumptions, jotting down visual ideas, and looking for a form from which to learn something. It turns out that (this kind of material) fills my notebooks, and I have to keep track of it to remember certain points. In the process, there's always a theme or assumption that comes up that I don't need to write down anymore and that I can't forget. I start checking it. It takes me a long time to see if this is what (something) is all about. As a side note, I'm always running additional experiments or measuring myself with different forms than usual. I find that some of them work, which surprises me. I recently came up with a description of this method: I plan future surprises in detail.
Please describe what your sample day at the studio looks like.
- Sometimes it is a video recording outside the studio, then in the studio I just rip the materials and from a distance check what came out. The work in such a case is to celebrate the event, that is, to locate myself at exactly the right time and place - at the only moment when a particular recording was possible. The idea is to do something ordinary at such a special moment, to feel the ordinary as something special. Recording an image for future work is something of a private ritual for me related to feeling myself in my life. On another day, I do something monotonous, such as cutting out frames for a film. Then my attention is focused on what is already being created - what is becoming a reality. I plan my next actions in relation to this fact. I post prints of frames and other references on the walls. Still another day I animate again what has already taken me a lot of time and attention. Then the studio turns into a laboratory. Nothing can be moved mindlessly and I have to move carefully. I then lock the studio to remember this special time.
What tools do you use to create photographs?
- Iphone X, Canon 60D, Canon 5D Mark II, Sony Alpha, MacBook, photocopy prints, pigment prints, Photoshop, cheap LED lights and cheap Chinese DC lights. Lenses are important to me, but without exaggeration. Although recently I had the opportunity to use a film Zeiss and the specificity of the image delighted me. For the last film I made a high table, where I can freely work standing up. My studio looks modest and amateurish, everything is taped together and pieced together for the moment - a particular image, photograph or object. I am a specialist in this area. I have already had studios: in a small room in a tenement, at home - in a large room in a tenement, outside the house - in a dormitory, in a big crude office room, in a small office room in an old office building, in an old country farm building and in still other places....
Are any of them your favorite?
- A studio at home is the most convenient on a daily basis, but outdoor studios allow for a good accumulation of time spent working. Among my favorites would be the large studio-room in the Polonez office space, a vast, bright and comfortable space, and my current (home) one - where spatial shortcomings recede into the background in terms of convenience and refinement of ergonomics of activities. In the meantime, a picture of the ideal studio appeared to me. It would be a separate building, preferably located in the woods or in relative seclusion. A two-story bright space. Upstairs one large room, with a glass roof. Downstairs a storage room with a possible additional room serving as a studio with lighting. The upstairs would be good for working with a few workstations, but still roomy enough to allow work to be tried out in the space. The lower studio would provide a parallel field for activities with animation and all related forms of image recording, with controlled lighting.
What was the main inspiration for the project Time Settings? By learning about the process of creating the various elements (especially the film and the object) you learn a lot about the medium of animation. Does it happen that the medium itself is an inspiration for you to create work? Or is it just a tool?
- Looking around in the medium is a constant inspiration for me. Sometimes understood broadly, and sometimes as a nuance. Such is the case with the "series" of animations I've been making for the past nine years: Resonance (2013), It Takes Time (2014), Veil of the Moment (2017), The Shape of the Moment (2018), Time Settings (2022). Each of these works transforms the method I have developed authoritatively and is a constant field of formal and intellectual entertainment for me. With the completion of each of these films, I had an idea for another, slightly different one.
Time Settings, I have no time, Shape of the moment, It Takes Time... The theme of time often runs through your works. What is time to you?
- It is a theme that is hard to bite. It provides problems on many levels. Fantasies about time are an essential part of religious and secular beliefs and rituals. The myth of how time works is present at all levels of culture. No less interesting are scientific attempts to solve the riddle of time. Absent at the level of physical equations (equations work both ways) - it contradicts the general picture of the universe, where the passage of time symbolized by the arrow of time (pointing in one direction: from the past to the future) is related to the second law of thermodynamics (in an isolated system, entropy always increases). Although it is considered relative from Einstein's theory time (it flows at different speeds depending on gravity and velocity), in everyday experience it is still close to absolute time from Newton's theory, which flows top-down - over and over again and everywhere the same. That is, a difficult subject. The operation of a film, like a piece of music, is closely related to the mechanisms of perceiving the passage of time. We remember the individual elements of a piece that are separated from each other in succession - a memory of continuity, of the piece as a whole, is formed. I use these otherwise elementary aspects of film to look at the moment in detail and perceive time. With procedures impossible outside the film included, for example, looking at time from the side, from a different perspective - as if its course is known before the actual moment of the event takes place - the so-called "time of the moment". here and now.
Please describe the creation of the photograph Remains of an Affect z 2022.
- It seems that this description will be a self-explanatory example of how the simultaneous construction of form and concept works for me. The beginning of the work was a side photographic experiment. I wanted to create the impression of unspecified ruins in a simple way, together with the impression of depth of space. Everything I needed for this I just happened to have in the studio - plasticine, unfinished resin work as a base, a print for the background. I printed the photo in large format. I needed to put that image in contact with some other knitting in another time. Hence the idea of matches - in association: flame/shot of time/entropy. While visiting my father, I had a moment to finally photograph what I was planning, and I asked him for help. The print was large, I planned to set the matches on fire, and then still use gasoline, and photograph it. After several attempts and burning the print from about ten images, I chose the one that was titled Remains of an Affect. In the general layer is a photograph of the impression of ruins, flattened on the print, as indicated by the matches and their shadows. In the layer only available to me, the image also relates to my relationship with my father, associated with a sense of his support and trust. It has turned into an image that binds reality on different levels. This feeling indicated that he was ready.
I am intrigued by this intense blue color in the Time Settings. Is there a specific reason why you used it?
- There are several. The blue would contrast well with the yellow-orange flames that appear in the film. This kind of blue also reminds me of my favorite time of day, before dusk. Besides, I wanted to make a film in color and black and white at the same time.
How do you select the materials on which you print photographs? Please answer with an example Remains of Affect of 2022 and the objects in the series Volume of Effort.
- I choose them anew for each series or work. The way to Remains of an Affect as printed in thermosublimation on fabric, was meant to refer in contrast to the almost photoshop-free method of creating the image. It added lightness and a slightly digital feel. Besides, it avoided the complications of framing (print, frame, glass, backing, etc.).
Objects shown at the exhibition Volume of Effort were created as a dialogue between the form of the photographic image and the form of the object in which the image materializes. In this case, photographic printing on rag paper matched the curved plywood elements.
How do post-production tools affect your art practice? When and how do you use them?
- Very different, I have several ways and simple workflows. The tools are usually transparent in the workflow. Sometimes I want to expose an aspect in a given work that relates to post-production in such a way that attention is also drawn to the tool and that it becomes an additional means of expression. This happens in the film Veil of the Moment (2016), in which most of the film frames contain handwritten Photoshop stamp marks. There is a paradox - the film shows its digitality due to the painstaking activity of treating each frame individually with a stamp by hand. I divide the animation process laboriously into pre-production, production and post-production. Paradoxically, in these films it is pre-production that requires the most intensive use of digital post-production tools.
Visual media are said to represent reality. How would you describe the relationship between the images you create and so-called reality?
- It is a far-fetched simplification to say that they represent reality. There can be a problem with such a statement even for the best scientific theories that predict well the operation of physical systems. Let's assume that, in general, what is meant is a reasonably objective and verifiable reality. Visual media equally represent and construct reality in various fields of broader culture and science. The question of verifying what (ultimately) reality is complicates the issue of its representation. It could be argued that our visual system represents reality. However, we know that it only represents certain aspects of it under certain conditions: in visible light, at certain scales and perspectives, and so on. It has evolved particularly well, for example, in recognizing different facial features, but again - only within certain similarities, found in a particular group, race. For a long time, visual media (painting) has represented the reality that can not be seen - it used to be images of deities, etc. Photography seems to have had a brief moment when it seemed to represent reality in the social sphere particularly strongly. I am referring to the days of chemical photography. With the onset of digital photography, we are seeing a rebound that is now accelerating even more, with 3D, montages and deep fakes. On the other hand - photographs of black holes confirm scientific theories formulated before such photographs were even possible. The more distant the object of observation, the less sharp these images are - the light is weak and taking pictures with radio telescopes takes too long. The matter around the black hole circulates fast enough that they come out blurry. Relationships with reality in my works refer to impressions, hunches, emotions, beliefs that feed on images. There is a gap between words and images. The visual sensation associated with a sense of reality is different from (the sensation resulting from reading) description. Description can be narrowed down, subjected to scientific methods of falsification. An image by itself, without description, does not submit to this method. Which does not change the fact that poetry can far better reflect our state of feeling reality than any description subject to the scientific method. That's why I see actions with images more as actions on reality. They are like phenomena that can be subjected to description only post factum. Being broader than their description, which would have to narrow down their context, they are as if before the text. This is how I see it in my practice: the reference to reality or lack thereof is not verifiable before interpreting the image with words, so this problem does not occur here. I certainly operate with a kind of realism of representations. I am fascinated by these issues, but they are so complex that I would not like to lock them within a single theory.
What feature of digital photography interests you the most?
- Ease.
What the work is about Untitled z Indifferent Star (2019)?
- This work was created on the sidelines of my mainstream activities and is related to the works shown in the exhibition I don't have time (2019) at the now-defunct 9/10 Gallery in Poznań. The objects presented there were created on the basis of photography, more or less moving away from it. This one (particular one) was created a little later, but it was taken from a very simplified male figure - as if it schematically consisted only of a head, heart and penis, which are connected by something like a spine. The shape is cast from a temperature-prone mixture of wax and rosin, which is surrounded by colored molds obtained by mixing pigments, gypsum, aluminum powder, minerals and epoxy resin. Embedded in the resin are two alcohol thermometers without graduations, which make contact respectively: one with the back of the head, the other with the base of the penis. Two processes struggle (with each other) in the work: one extremely simplifying and schematizing (the human figure), the other referring to extreme complexity and indeterminacy (the surroundings of the figure and the materiality of the whole). The combination of these disparate features defines my view of humanity, exposes the rift in the identity/existential sphere, undermines schematicism and allows complexity to be celebrated, to sink in. Humanity here is a primitive set of drives and an enigma at the same time. He is measurable, but lacks a scale to which to refer in these measurements.
How do you work on an exhibition display? Please tell us using the example of an exhibition The shape of the moment 2018.
- Working on that exhibition was simple. It came from the naturalness of the situation - I showed the title film The shape of the moment and objects created on the basis of animation, in the space of my studio at the time - a large, unfinished office space. We are at an exhibition that happens simultaneously in the space of the studio and in the space of the film. Each dimension of this exhibition is different. The objects spread around the room are stopped, we set them in motion with our movement in the space, but they are dead, motionless. Stopping in front of the film, we perceive that these objects move, they are alive, they tell the complexity of the world by their methods. This impression was emphasized by the fact that I shot the film in three-dimensional (anaglyph) technique - glasses were needed to perceive the impression of depth. In this technique, the way of shooting affects the sense of scale - objects in the film seem monumental. In reality, outside the film, they are quite small, distributed in a rather vast space, whose unfinished floor dusts peculiarly, leaving traces on shoes. I was accompanied by a sense of scattering the objects over a kind of desert - which here is the work space of a modern Western man, i.e. an office room.
What do you associate the term post-photography with?
- Somewhat with postmodern academic theories that have trouble formulating this difference, they get lost in the ambiguities of terminology. In a general sense, it doesn't make any particular difference to me whether someone characterizes my practice as post-photographic or not, unless it would be an association that pejoratively shoehorns the entire range of activities into the framework of some narrow aesthetic.
If I were to be tempted to answer the question of what is post-photography, I would use a broad statement based on technological genesis: all digital photography is post-photography. Photography can flirt with post-photography and vice versa, but this one distinction makes sense to me. Either the image was created as dots on film, or it was created as a digital record. We only have access to the latter through an interface. We can't see its true nature - the voltage flows on hard disks. Every single pixel of the image might as well be on another disk, arriving at one common screen from very far away, at the speed of light.
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The interview with Mateusz Sadowski is part of the project Ctrl F5 (www.ctrlf5.pl), within the framework of which the artists explain how they use digital images using their own artistic practice as an example. The project is made possible thanks to a grant from the Fund for the Promotion of Creativity as part of the activities of the ZAiKS Authors Association.
Mateusz Sadowski (1984) - lives and works in Poznan. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, where he defended his doctorate. Winner of the scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage "MŁODA POLSKA". Winner of the 7th Samsung Art Master Award 2010. Winner of the Chris Frayne Award for the best animated film at the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival in 2016. He currently teaches at the Department of Photography at the Magdalena Abakanowicz University of Arts in Poznan. He collaborates with Stereo Gallery.
Magdalena Żołędź - PhD student at the Faculty of Media Art at the University of Arts in Poznań; her doctoral (and artistic) work deals with the concept of post-photography. As part of this research, she co-manages with Anita Osuch and Lena Peplińska an archive of "post-photography" projects at POSTFOTOGRAFIA.PL