'The Sleep of Ulro'

 Too often photorealistic art seems like perfect reflection of our culture - mechanical, celebrating surface, a bit bloodless, a bit pointless. Co-opting photography is not necessarily a means of gaining power over it. But there are artists whose work transcends artifice - who use technology to draw our reluctant attention to something real. 

We are jaded from images, punch drunk from pictures. We are a society saturated in images of violence, to the point where the savagery no longer seems quite real. Gulf War or Grand Theft Auto? At some point the lines become blurred. But occasionally something in the endless parade of pixels 
and pantone catches our eye, tells us something new makes us re-see and re-think. 

Bartosz Kolata's paintings throw a welcome spanner in the works. They wonder about the consequences of our inurement. They gently nudge us back to the point where human suffering and injustice mattered. The surfaces are perfect - and not so perfect. Some derive their effect from the juxtaposition of semi-familiar images of innocence and destruction. A hint of deja vu draws us in. Have we seen those running, laughing children somewhere? Then we look further. Did we really see them run from flaming oil silos? Perhaps not, but we could have. At first it might seem like a cheap trick - "war is a bad thing - I know - let's use kids!" but these paintings are subtler than that. They don't tell us what to think - they make us wonder. Where is the child who owned the Lost Blue Ball? We don't know why but we are suddenly uneasy. What will become of the boy who is intently observing the dead body in Stolen Children I (Curiosity)? The bare delineation of the corpse may be an aesthetic choice but it also has echoes of the outlines bodies at crime scenes - and the substance of the person is absent, metaphorically as well as literally. Is the red spot on the small Jewish boy's forehead a laser sight or is that blood dripping down? And why a Jewish child when his tribe are often seen as the aggressors?
We snag on these slightly awkward details and our attention is held and we have to think again. 

In William Blake's poem Jerusalem, The Sleep of Ulro is when a soul falls into the realm of torment, suffering, and death. It's a fallen, material world, which has lost contact with Eternity, a place of error and misperception where everything is reversed. "We look down into Ulro. We behold the wonders of the Grave." Blake wanted to wake his contemporaries up. We too need to wake up and art such as this can help us do it.

Cathy Dillon 
Arts journalist 
March 2010