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  Petrification / Zkamenělina | 2014 - 2017

________Own text to the exhibition (gallery Josef Sudek Studio)___april2016_______ * Near the sea, the infinite horizon, I have a tendency to photograph with infinity focus, the surface of the water, which shimmers, differently each time, but always the same. The ‘Moment’ is defined by my presence. When I leave, it will end. ‘That was’, is, and probably will also be there. * I try to see the photograph as an object regardless of the subject matter depicted. Not to distingish the natural pictoriality, not to read the picture through the context of the original object, but as the materialized nature of what is depicted, that is, a physical presence. Photography does not recall. Fotography is here. Does that make sense? * Can the photograph emancipate itself from its external pre-picture, which has helped it come into existence? * The relationship between a pre-picture and a picture. The porcelain vase is cast from a form. The photograph is an enlargement of a negative. The tulips are beginning to grow. In the same place as last year and the year before last. In the same colour and shape. * I am still wondering about the flower that I planted in the garden. I photographed it, and ended up with only its image. But I didn’t want to talk about the flower. I wanted to talk about the porcelain vase. I photographed it only at the exhibition. That is to say, I documented it in a photograph. The photograph comes from the same context to which it will ultimately return, but no longer as a document of the vase; it bears its own meaning. If I am unable to take a photograph out of its external context, will it be a negation if I keep it? * And there is something else that isn’t clear to me. A photograph in a photograph. Is that an object or something else? ______Petrification (Drdova Gallery)___january2015_______ Václav Kopecký exhibits an exhibition. An eponymous exhibition was held in the summer in the House of Art in České Budějovice; moreover, the viewers at Drdova Gallery only encounter the exhibition by means of various references: a thin catalogue with several reproductions, deinstalled photographs and exhibited china by Antonín Tomášek. Kopecký works with the history of a particular exhibition that not only has been but still is. He shows us the situation after the closing of the exhibition as well as right after the opening, dealing with photography on various levels at once. The title of the exhibition alludes to reproductions produced by nature; the exhibited china alludes to reproducible casts that represent both an original and a copy in a certain sense; and finally, the catalogue alludes to photography used to document an exhibition that is no more. When Václav described his intention to me it made me think of various empty galleries in the history of art that have been mediated to me through photographs and books; I thought of Yves Klein who exhibited emptiness in a Paris gallery in the late 1950s, of George Brecht and his presentation Three Chair Events at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York; perhaps because of the fact that the gallery window facing the street as depicted in a documentation photograph reminds me of the gallery of Lucie Drdová in some way. Obviously, the concrete realization of the original idea, which was strongly influenced by the given space as well as by the viewers, played an important role. It is the imperfection of the final realization, which is limited by real conditions, that can be interesting to us today. That is why an empty gallery is but one of the levels of the exhibition and definitely not the intended result. Rather than an ambitious gesture, it represents a deliberate effort to use the available means as thoroughly as possible. (text by Hana Buddeus)