Robert Swierczynski – Restless

Western society – despite numerous crises, still prosperous and well-nourished, proud of its flagship cosmopolitanism – continues to perfectly simulate its commitment to global problems, while in fact remaining completely indifferent. This impassivity deepens everyday human frustration. The immensity of the outside world attacking us makes us mad. We are anxious, and our collective fear evokes strange defensive reactions, unnatural reflexes and gestures, behaviours full of tension and despair.

Restless aims to reveal that discomfort and confinement of people’s ordinary lives, exposing their carefully concealed areas of concern and directing the attention towards the ubiquitous anxiety – a feeling that dominates modern humanism and plagues people regardless of their social and existential position.

To a large extent, Restless resembles a voyeuristic catalogue of awkward moments that we wouldn’t be eager to flaunt, even though they instantly bring us back to life through a sincere and straightforward observation.

People blend in with their surroundings. Reverting sight, immersed in their thoughts, absent in time and space. Elegant, sublime, yet repressed and alienated. Trapped in strange, difficult to describe situations of disbelief and hesitation. Completely isolated.

Precise composition and razor-sharp clarity are allowed to unify the aesthetics and bring out the psychological and sociological nuances through a series of emotionally and semantically charged photographs. Mixing well-thought randomness with stylized ugliness, weirdness with familiarity, ambiguity with explicitness, helps to construct a rather cold, distanced, and sort of paused reality, on the edge of comprehension.