“As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty.” (Jonas Mekas)
It is the year 2000, summer. The Zderzak Gallery in Kraków hosts the first exhibition of Rafał Bujnowski, titled "Photos."All the paintings presented there were created at the turn of the millennium, based on the artist's family albums. Among them are self-portraits, portraits of his parents—Teresa and Jan—and his sister Marta, as well as scenes from vacations and home life (Teresa taking a bath). The Photos paintings have an exercise-like character; they are schematic yet fully convey the emotional charge of childhood black-and-white photographs.
1977—the first seaside vacation of three-year-old Rafał with his parents in Mrzeżyno-Dźwiżyno. In the photograph (and, 23 years later, in the painting exhibited at the Zderzak Gallery), we see a boy on the beach building sandcastles. There are already a dozen, but it is not the end—the building continues. In other photographs glued into the same album, titled "Rafał’s Childhood. Volume II," black silhouettes of people appear against an overexposed sky, sea, and sand. The artist would go on to paint these black-and-white beaches for the next two decades.
2025, a fragment of a Google Meets conversation between Ewa Tatar and Rafał Bujnowski (Warsaw, La Oliva):
- And, for example, when you're on the beach with those sandcastles? Do you remember that situation?
- Only through the photos. Only through the photos, their high-contrast form. They are overexposed, technically rather unprofessional. Probably an unconscious choice by my father to oversaturate them like that. That, too, accompanies me and shapes my visual imagination.
In later albums, we see domestic scenes, objects from the times of the Polish People's Republic and the transition period, houses, curtains, snow, clouds, a person in a tree, black lakes, a sailboat, cars, and adults standing nearby smoking cigarettes. All these motifs later appear in Bujnowski’s paintings. They repeat, intertwine, and return like the schemas described by Jeffrey Young (who laid the foundation for psychodynamic and Gestalt therapy)—deeply ingrained patterns formed in childhood and early youth, which in adulthood influence one's perception of the world, oneself, and others.
Bujnowski’s paintings are not records of childhood memories because the artist has no access to them. The memories have been erased, replaced by his father’s vivid black-and-white photographs. The function of these photos is not to remember, to preserve memories—it is to not remember. If they had never been taken, everything would have turned out completely different. And certainly, the twenty-five-year-long artistic career of Rafał Bujnowski. Because his entire body of work originates precisely from these albums.
The "Our Life Together" project was financed by the European Union NextGenerationE
