“Now these things never happened, but always are.”

This sentence by Sallustius on the theme of myth can explain, on its own and with extraordinary concision, the works on exhibition: twenty-three single edition photographs, which the Doppelgaenger Gallery has long wished to exhibit, since the work of an artist like Miroslav Tichý, with his multifaceted soul and his paradoxical life, was immediately identified as the right starting point for new research projects, for moving beyond other shadow lines.
In the contemporary history of fine art photography, Tichý’s works seem like the signs of an obscure alphabet, variants of a new literature: they invert methods and suspend forms. The artist himself, with disenchanted irony, stated: “all you need, first of all, is a really terrible camera to take beautiful photos.” And so Tichý transcends the dreaded technical reproducibility, with an operation we could describe, with a certain levity, as suspended somewhere between the naïf and Art Brut. He makes his own passpartouts, marks his works with graphite, scratches the paper, which sometimes even looks torn, and creates a new modus that brings photography much closer to the other figurative arts.
Tichý’s love affair with art happened in Czechoslovakia between the 1960s and the 1980s; over that period the artist composed a veritable glut of works, of stolen snapshots, all within an artistic vision characterised by omission, of moments captured with a stylistic skill that becomes photography, but that would transmit the same authorial potency whatever the chosen type of representation. In many works the attention to background – which is a typically pictorial feature – becomes significant. Indeed, painting was the point of departure for Tichý’s artistic quest, an expressive form he nevertheless abandoned in the 1950s when he began to construct his own cameras made out of disparate salvaged materials and simple lenses, in order to convey the impression on film of the instinctual rapidity of the pencilled sketch.
His subjects are bodies that yield themselves, introduced to reality from the background that at times imposes itself on them, giving them the paradox of being both subject and protagonist, yet fleeting figures all the same. Time is stopped in the snapshot, not as mimetic representation, but rather as immanent form: the provisional nature of the works and chosen media used in their composition flows into the photographic atmospheres. The transience of these shots – and of the radical flaneurie as Tichý’s elected lifestyle – suggests a further reading, one which is evocative, romantic and sensual, and acts as a temporal pendant to the finished nature of the works themselves. And so the lines of a body, the contours of a woman, now vague, now clear and well-defined, take shape as enchanted horizon lines, which refute any real inspection from the everyday.
The works depict figures in habitual poses and attitudes, in known and shared events, without renouncing their own history or biography, since these figures are the true vessels of Tichý’s poetics. These works weren’t conceived and crafted in order to be shown; in reality our gaze is just an interference, and so they remain gestures that belong always and only to themselves, to that one unique moment in which the “homespun” shot and then the development took place. This is one of the involuntary gifts that the artist has given us: it seems likely that Tichý’s artistic-photographic circumnavigation couldn’t or shouldn’t be. The events depicted are closed to interpretation, to reconsideration and reinterpretation, in a solid and felicitous self-sufficiency. Trying to comprehend the rules of an intimacy so jealously conserved might end up being a purely selfish act – even though this intimacy has now been revealed, now that we can see all of Tichý’s photographs saved by the artist and psychotherapist, Roman Buxbaum, one of the few mediators between the Czech photographer and the outside world.
Perhaps, standing in front of Tichý’s photographs, we should “simply” give in to the fascination of works that suggest the consequences of an artistic melancholy; and try to understand the sense of a memory that is reluctant to assert itself in these poetical paradoxes. So we should let ourselves be spectators of a parallel earthly and transitory world: in these works, the time of the everyday continues to flow, while the image exists for a moment at least.
This suspension, this distance from things find a similar chord in Michelangelo Antonioni’s words, who in the same period wrote: “…we know that beneath the revealed image there is another one that is more faithful to reality, and beneath this there is yet another one, and yet another one beneath the last, until [we arrive at] the true image of absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the moment of the decomposition of every image, of every reality.”
In portraying events, both masters often de-temporalise their images, and a dystopian dimension organises the material, regardless of the narration. The pictorial formation becomes evident: the artist works on his photos as on pieces of drawing paper, wearing out the narration, not following the rules of photography (point of view, sharp focus, etc.) in order to invent another way of organising the profilmic of every shot. While in other images it is the composition that controls the work: metaphysical constructs appear, structures in black and white, solid geometric-like shapes to which even human figures belong. Or else, a further dimension slips in to deprive the event of its own time-frame, a dimension that renders the works more complex, despite the banality of the occasions described. The extension of the image composition is coordinated by a kind of theatrical stage which becomes – for instance – a towel placed on the ground, whose perspective traverses the open space, bright and confidential, until it loses itself in the grey embrace of the background at the opposite angle.
The lightest compositional astuteness for Tichý is what makes for the great skill of photography, its ability to stop eternity, to stop the instant; moments over which we can pause for a second time, in the intimate dimension of the artisan’s print, in which his obsessive quest is expressed as a calm extension. These works recall, and so align Tichý with, all those great classical artists that the Wittkowers so perspicaciously called Born under Saturn.