\u201cNow these things never happened, but always are.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 Tich\u00fd, 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.
\nIn the contemporary history of fine art photography, Tich\u00fd\u2019s 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: \u201call you need, first of all, is a really terrible camera to take beautiful photos.\u201d And so Tich\u00fd transcends the dreaded technical reproducibility, with an operation we could describe, with a certain levity, as suspended somewhere between the na\u00eff 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.
\nTich\u00fd\u2019s 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 \u2013 which is a typically pictorial feature \u2013 becomes significant. Indeed, painting was the point of departure for Tich\u00fd\u2019s 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.
\nHis 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 \u2013 and of the radical flaneurie as Tich\u00fd\u2019s elected lifestyle \u2013 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.
\nThe 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 Tich\u00fd\u2019s poetics. These works weren\u2019t 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 \u201chomespun\u201d shot and then the development took place. This is one of the involuntary gifts that the artist has given us: it seems likely that Tich\u00fd\u2019s artistic-photographic circumnavigation couldn\u2019t or shouldn\u2019t 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 \u2013 even though this intimacy has now been revealed, now that we can see all of Tich\u00fd\u2019s photographs saved by the artist and psychotherapist, Roman Buxbaum, one of the few mediators between the Czech photographer and the outside world.
\nPerhaps, standing in front of Tich\u00fd\u2019s photographs, we should \u201csimply\u201d 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.
\nThis suspension, this distance from things find a similar chord in Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s words, who in the same period wrote: \u201c\u2026we 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.\u201d
\nIn 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 \u2013 for instance \u2013 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.
\nThe lightest compositional astuteness for Tich\u00fd 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\u2019s print, in which his obsessive quest is expressed as a calm extension. These works recall, and so align Tich\u00fd with, all those great classical artists that the Wittkowers so perspicaciously called Born under Saturn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":178,"template":"","meta":[],"exhibitioncat":[13],"class_list":["post-397","exhibitions","type-exhibitions","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","exhibitioncat-past"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions\/397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/exhibitions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"exhibitioncat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/galleriadoppelgaenger.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exhibitioncat?post=397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}