The father of Aneta Bartos is a passionate body-builder. He asked his daughter to immortalize him in fitness competition poses. This sport makes him happy and he wanted to retain him in classical Greek ideal beauty he still cultivates.
Aneta Bartos found there an ideal subject for her new series, as provocative as innocent, and she scripted it in places where she spent her childhood with her father, where almost unconscious memories lift. They’re of a small town in Poland, in the forests, where the father was shaped by its rural culture under the communist political regime. Living a “naturist” life and eating organic food, he has always kept a young body full of vitality and energy.
The pictures in this series are full of chiaroscuro margins. The body of the “couple” – Bartos enters this Oedipal tribute in an indecisive edge. The waves are sometimes coyly crossed out there. But not necessarily. Each photo mixes wakefulness and dream, there where the woman appears before an ineffable languor, while the man plays the drunken wrestler, sometimes resembling a postmodern Mussolini.
The voyeur is submitted to trap images, and to their labyrinths more than to their evidence. He himself carried to the hotel of dreams. Yet everything remains impenetrable. The woman and the man seem unwilling prisoners of their own “game.” A doubt remains present. What do they want to do? The image is anything but a passing shadow. The absence is not expansive but becomes the delectable contraction of time.
Here, everything is sensual but subtly shifted. The couple plays: she plays with him inserting into complicity. It suggests a pleasure, a tenderness that may arise between people by multiplying exhibitions. Everything is disturbing, funny, ridiculously ceremonial. Aneta Bartos combines the asceticism of the tiger with the exuberance of the snail to begin takes that sculpt the body and where the sensuality takes paradoxical forms.
Jean-Paul Gavard Perret
