Symphony No. 7. Sounds of Love.

You ask what is the main thing in my life with all of them,
I'll tell you: death and love-both both.
One's eyes are black, the other's fashionable I'm afraid.
These two are my love and two my death.

- Jan Lechoń

colors fade
symphonies quiet the bells are heard

We open the book and look at its first pages. We see scattered on the floor images frozen in time. Notes from a very long life. Tadeusz is not there. He is in the next picture, all alone, in a purple room where "the colors fade, the symphonies grow quiet [...] the bells are heard." He looks toward the window. Does the title ring out in his memory Symphony No. 7? Does he reminisce or does he look forward to the future? Tamara Pieńko, the author of extremely intimate portraits of the artist, allows us to accompany him in his apprehension, separation and longing. The photographs are complemented by Tadeusz's poems addressed to an unknown woman. These are the words of a , "too early born" to await any solace with her.

During martial law, in 1982, Tadeusz Rolke, after separating from his partner, creates a series entitled "Beatrice." Recalling it in one of our private conversations, he recalls a quote from the poem "Meeting" by Jan Lechoń. The hero of this work, Dante Alighieri, addresses the lyrical subject with these words: "There is no heaven and earth, no abyss, no hell. There is only Beatrice. And she is precisely absent." The last two sentences become the motto of the aforementioned cycle. Thus Tadeusz joins the male procession of those who flow with the current of unfulfilled love...About her and for her the ninety-year-old artist writes his haiku, which are included in "Symphony No. 7. Sounds of Love." This hunger seems to be a constant element of his artistic and personal identity.

Tadeusz Rolke's Beatrice, from forty years ago, was a faceless, identityless woman: naked, with a blindfold over her eyes and white socks on her feet. She was an image, a symbol and a male projection of an undefined idea of a woman inscribed at the end of the 20th century. A woman objectified and metaphysical at the same time, emerging from the world behind the "wall without doors," as Tadeusz put it in one of his poems. Through her he evoked the kind of love that feeds on a fleeting glance and painfully prolonged longing, one that ultimately becomes the essence of desiring someone's presence and carnality and life itself.

Dante's Beatrice gives the poet a tour of paradise, which he arrives at just after directly experiencing the horrific images of hell and purgatory. I didn't ask Tadeusz whether in his former series depicting the repose of suffering and amorous loss one should also look for a metaphor of his childhood, so marked by the trauma of war. After all, it is impossible to get rid of such a thought when one is even vaguely familiar with the biography of this artist. How much is there in this longing for the idea of a woman a childish desire to unite with his mother and the need to regain the sense of security lost so early? How much of it is a boyish hunger for unconditional admiration and acceptance from others, and how much of it is pure desire, filling every cell of the body, which becomes an end in itself? To these questions only the protagonist of "Symphony No. 7. Sounds of Love" knows the answer.

"Symphony No. 7. Sounds of Love," which is forty years apart from the "Beatrice" series, brings a new perspective. The naked lover in white socks transforms into a woman from the backyard of memory, whose image blurs and slowly fades, just as we disappear from this world. The roles are reversed. In this contemporary project, it is HE who submits to another's gaze. A photographer, a man in love, a lost boy and an old man experienced by life appear in front of the camera lens, with a woman behind it. Artist Tamara Pienko builds a relationship in which Tadeusz is not an object or subject, someone without personality or face. Nor is he an idea. He is a flesh and blood man, a subject experiencing his own incompleteness, bodily weakness and fatigue, a man exposing his sense of unfulfillment and loneliness. This collection of photographs is arranged in a kind of collective unfinished portrait, which for more than three years - because that's how long the creative process took - right before her eyes emerged into existence. The author of the photos accompanies Tadeusz in his despair, becomes his confidante and companion in his wait for love. In this story, we won't hear the ticking of a clock in a cramped, stuffy room; instead, we will see open spaces filled with blood-red light and ecstatic music - all eternally alive, not subject to the passage of time.

We hold in our hands an album that, whether we want it or not, evokes our own experiences of the theme of transience and lack of fulfillment. Through the portraits, which are a record of the face and figure of the more than ninety-year-old Tadeusz, as well as his lyrics, this longing takes on a special power. There is nothing of voyeurism in these photographs, because Tamara is not peeping at Tadeusz, but is his shadow, a Presence right next to his Presence, a companion in the lingering and endless waiting for fulfillment.

Seen through Tamara's lens, Tadeusz is alone: pensive and immersed in self-reflection, touching objects, measuring himself against his own old age. Only two photos show a woman whose feet the artist is hugging and kissing. Naked feet, without white socks... Thaddeus voluntarily from the position of observer of the object for a moment transforms himself into an object of desire. He is like Bruno Schultz in his autobiographical drawing from the 1930s entitled "Woman on a Couch and a Kneeling Man", who washes her feet. He persists in his devotion, uncompromising and sincere. His adoration is overt - it needs no mediation. He is the one who "lovedknesses suffering for the gods[1] ", as he writes in his "Epitaph". What does it mean that he loves for the gods? Who are they? Since they were written in lower case and plural, perhaps he means those of the Greek pantheon, residing somewhere in the recesses of our genetic memory? When we go back to the sources, we recall that the ancient Eros had the divine power to awaken Psyche from dormancy, and from their union was born Hedone - the goddess of pleasure...So the eternal motif of desire as a drive for life is evoked.

This path can lead us directly to Symphony No. 7 Beethoven's "The Song of the Bachanalia," which provides Taddeus with a metaphor for unfulfilled love. Beethoven himself mentioned that the inspiration for the piece came from the Roman Bacchanalia - after all, music, like wine, becomes a means of spiritual intoxication. Richard Wagner described Symphony No. 7 As the "apotheosis of dance." It is music that brings body and mind together, and thus enables fullness of experience.

Interplay Symphony No. 7 with the main theme of this album becomes even more palpable when one recalls that Beethoven - said to be gloomy, even gloomy by nature - notoriously fell in love with someone and was accompanied until his death by the image of an "eternal lover." I don't know if Tadeusz knew this when he heard this longing in his music one sunny day in France. It resounded deeply in his soul at the moment when, looking out the window, he saw the outline of his Beatrice's silhouette disappearing into a narrow street... It is interesting that an artist who used painting all his life used music to describe the states of his soul. Tamara Pienko translated these feelings and impressions into the language of photography, creating phenomenal portraits of Tadeusz immersed in his own phantasmagoria of life.

untouchable principia
all exceptions withheld

state of mind like the state of the body I do not envy

night never falls

longing

***

Tamara Pienko, photographer, artist, portraitist, fascinated by the world of psychology and philosophy, creating a series of highly subjective photographic essays, explores the knowledge of human behavior, as well as the mechanisms and laws governing the human psyche.
For Tamara, the camera is a tool for exploring subjects, often important to herself, which gain a special focus through the lens while retaining a kind of delicacy.
She is the author of projects of a social nature. The artist's works are an exposition of non-trivial subjects, touching on existence in its true human dimension.

Symphony No. 7. Sounds of Love is an extremely intimate project. It is a testimony to what is most valuable for a photographer in her creative work, namely experiencing through proximity and kinship with the protagonist of a particular project being a witness and confidante.

To write about Tadeusz Rolke that he is a living legend of Polish photography is like writing nothing at all. The biography of this remarkable artist is very rich, abounding in numerous events of artistic and non-artistic nature. Born on May 24, 1929 in Warsaw, the artist is a forerunner of Polish reportage photography and a member of the Union of Polish Art Photographers. Among other things, he depicted the living conditions of Polish Roma and the artistic life of the capital. He published photographs in the Polish and German press. He was the author of numerous exhibitions and photographic projects around the world. He is a master for several generations of photographers, a mentor and a model for those looking at the reality around us through the lens of the camera. He was awarded the Gold Medal "Meritorious for Culture Gloria Artis" for his exceptional achievements.
A subject over which Tadeusz Rolke - a sensitive artist and emotional man - has bent with particular care is his fascination with female beauty. Through a subjective filter, with unusual tenderness and often even adoration, he passed through the images of numerous women in search of his Beatrice. The expression of this longing became, among other things, an individual series of nudes with just such a title. And it was the Beatrice series that became an important, though not the only, motif providing inspiration for the Seventh Symphony. Sounds of Love.
Tadeusz Rolke expresses his admiration for female beauty not only through photography, but also through short poetic forms written over the years. It is these that have become the germ of the creation of this album. The artist appears in it as someone who experiences the world with an extraordinary, even unbearable, intensity, through all his senses - image, word and music become a mirror reflecting his unique sensitivity and ability for self-reflection.