Bartek Pierściński

This project showcases a wide range of characters, spanning from the photorealistic to the cartoon. By appropriating and decontextualising images, it highlights the impact of characters on visual iconography and image-making, and explores the potential of the visual language of comics, where meaning is created by absence and fragmentation. This eclectic body of work demonstrates how the minimising of details and appearance of the physical world, in favour of the idea of form, places the character in the world of concepts, enabling the viewer to enter a fictional world with the character acting as a psychological vessel, absorbing their identity and awareness. Through caricatural self-portraiture, the show functions as a critique of stereotypical images of masculinity within visual culture.

Photograph: Michał Betta @mbet.ta