David Možný / Blink of an Eye

The artists of the collective exhibition The Other Side of a Photograph share unusual visuality, the consistency of light and the concept of individual photographs that challenge conventions. Selected works by the tandem of Lukáš Jasanský and Martin Polák, Michal Kalhous, Alena Kotzmannová, Marie Kratochvílová and Markéta Othová, in dialogue with Jan Svoboda's personal approach to photography and Jiří Kovanda's subtle interventions, allow us to glimpse, through their shared sensitivity, the hidden reality of the world in unexpected detail.

The selection of analogue, mostly black-and-white photographs seemingly captures what almost all of us see. In many cases, banal and sometimes even unphotogenic situations, often emphasised in a deliberately unprofessional manner to the point of amateur photography, are sometimes embarrassing. However, the mundane in them opens up wide boundaries of beauty that we probably would not have thought of without their help. Susan Sontag descrines it in the chapter The Heroism of Vision: “No one has ever found ugliness through photography. But many have discovered beauty in this way. Except when the camera is used for documentation or as part of a social ritual, what makes people take photographs is a desire to find something beautiful..."[1]

All of the artists, like Jan Svoboda (1934-1990) from the late 1960s, have in various ways transcended the established principles and canons of photography and in their distinctive approach deliberately questioned its supposed message and formal perfection, expanding it with new possibilities of treatment and perception. "The things I do show no artistry. And I want them not to. I want them not to be pretty, to be as ordinary as possible, not to dazzle, not to shock, not to surprise...”[2] Just like Svoboda's work, the works of the mentioned artists have never aspired to conform to standard photographic practices, and like him, some of them have also expressed their opposition to the very term photographer. The theorists Pavel Vančát and Jan Freiberg introduced for their broader thinking and grasp of the medium the fitting tem of "nonphotography"[3] referencing the term anti- or non-photography coined by Nancy Foote in 1976 in relation to postmodern photography.[4]

What makes their photographs so similar is their sophisticated work with technical imperfection, the peculiar tonality of the narrow grey scale and often the use of large formats in sharp contrast to the intimacy and apparent banality of the chosen subjects. Like Svoboda, they focus on their immediate surroundings such as the environment of their homes and the ordinary objects with which we share our private space. In a photograph constructed as an autonomous surface, the role of light in its reflection and absorption is essential, and so is the relationship between objects and their background, with its demarcation often so subtle that the two planes almost merge. This is of course enhanced by the narrow tonality of grey in the choice of black-and-white photography: "Since black-and-white configurations are theoretical, they cannot really exist in the world. But black-and-white photographs do exist. They are in fact the images of the conceptions of the theory of optics, which means that they arose from this theory. [...] Therein lies their strange beauty, identical to the beauty of the conceptual universe. This is why many photographers prefer black-and-white photographs as they reveal more clearly the true meaning of photography, i.e. the world of conceptios."[5]

In regard to the legacy of Jan Svoboda and his exceptional sensitivity, the exhibition shows selected photographs from the broader oeuvres of the individual artists in which forms and procedures more or less referring to Svoboda's work can be recognized. Due to the very narrow theme scope of the exhibition concept, images from various cycles and in some cases diptychs have been selected in collaboration with the artists, and it should be noted that their meaning, which was established in the original context through the composition of their units, has been altered for this specific event.

[1] SONTAG, Susan. O fotografii. Brno, Praha a Litomyšl: Barrister & Principal a Paseka, p. 80.

[2] OTHOVÁ, Markéta; CÍSAŘ, Karel; JANÍČKOVÁ, Adéla, a NOVOTNÝ, Michal. Markéta Othová: již brzy. V Praze: Národní galerie, 2022, p. 7.

[3] VANČÁT, Pavel, a FREIBERG, Jan (eds.). Fotografie?? / Photography?? (exh. cat.). Klatovy: Galerie Klatovy / Klenová, 2004.

[4] FOOTE, Nancy. The Anti-Photographers. Artforum, September 1976, year 15, no. 1., pp. 46–54. Also here:

Douglas FOGLE (ed.). The Last Picture Show. Artists Using Photography, 1960–1982 (exh. cat.). Minneapolis: Walker Art Center 2003, pp. 24–31.

[5] FLUSSER, Vilém. Za filosofii fotografie. Prague: Fra, 2013, pp. 48–49.

David Možný / Blink of an Eye

12.05.2021 - 14.08.2021

Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Pavel Švec

Opening day: May 12 2021, 5 pm–9 pm

Obstinately precise technical rendering accentuating detail. Emphasis on direct, sensory experience and an almost physical effect on the viewer. Continuously developed expressive handwriting inspired by personal fascination rather than by an interest in the latest trends and tendencies in contemporary art. Spectacularly shared doubts over the distinction of the borders between reality and illusion, between machine algorithms of a virtual environment and a fluid realiy which surrounds us outside the reach of the monitors and displays of our smart devices. These are the main attributes in the work of David Možný (*1963), an artist who has earned recognition thanks to his digitally animated videos and video installations.

In the artist’s series for the Fait Gallery, the core of his oeuvre shifts closer to the classic approach to a work of art, whereas in the selection of topics Možný remains consistent. An almost ubiquitous film narrative gradually becomes a mere predictor and a fragment inviting the viewer’s active participation. As if it now were the viewer that is the hero of the film and the only one able to untangle all its metaphysical, latently criminal plots. However, like, for example, in David Lynch’s films, their solving is far from unambiguous and involves an emotional level intertwined with the feelings of oppression, emptiness and pointlessness. Through his well-considered and carefully elaborated interventions into the perceived reality or its modified visualization, Možný leads the viewer out of illusory certainties and balance and reveals the disquieting fragility of our ingrained conceptions of the world which, however, defies stability. The props here do not serve as a backdrop for a plot but become the main carrier of information, the content of which oscillates between an intimate representation of a mental and emotional state and a visionary report about the state of our civilization and the world in which we live.

The moment of disquieting disjoining is encountered at the very entrance to the exhibition, as the imaginary base of what is before our eyes is not found on the floor on which we stand: the space before us splits into two alternative worlds. Somewhere in a gap between them there arises a question of the cohesion of the props in which our lives are staged, the paradoxical nature of which we have come to denote reality. Možný’s fiction thus takes us via a detour back to the problems of reality, or more precisely, to the question “where does reality take place?”. The mentioned tendencies culminate in the installation LIMBO, whose title refers to the purgatory or in a broader sense, to a state of the separation from the conventional structures of the world. Our bipolar inclinations and thought schemas collapse here before our eyes, as does the flimsy spectrum of our rational thinking.

Nonetheless, the method which Možný often employs in his works and which could be compared to the construction of theatre props is seen elsewhere at the exhibition, completely reversed. A random viewer might overlook that instead of something posing as an ordinary cardboard box (provided with the mysterious and again somewhat disquieting inscription FEAR GOD) they are in fact looking at a polychrome bronze sculpture – an exact copy of a package in which the artist, when providing material, received one of his orders from China. While props are usually mere substitutes, imitations of more noble materials and more sophisticated work procedures, here we witness the factual opposite. Our perception and reality thus clash again.

One might get the impression that the imaginary content intersection of all the pieces on show is thus a poignant conflict relationship between two (or more) parallel levels, yet we find among them one that also offers a kind of catharsis. LOVE – the last word in the diary of the writer W. S. Burroughs – is transferred here into three dimensions and accentuated with the state of permanent burning. The bluish flame seems to indicate that in a sense sharing exceeds the categories of life and death on the interface of which Burroughs’s diary entry was created. Love as the only thing able to reconcile permanent and omnipresent conflict. Neither wisdom nor experience, no holy grail, no satori, no solution... And if love doesn’t last forever? Well, then we are left to make do with anything between eternity and the blink of an eye.

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