Fait gallery

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Fait Gallery MEM, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno

Curator: Jiří Ptáček

Opening: 25th October, 7 pm

Jiří Thýn (b. 1977) counts among prominent Czech post-conceptual photographers of the middle generation. Over the past twenty years, he has explored the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines: objects, installations, moving images, poetry, drawing and painting. Through these "other media", however, he has always primarily employed photography as a tool that allows him empathetic, emotionally tinged and unavoidably subjective insights into the problems that he sets himself.

Jiří Thýn's works are not only reflections of the photographic medium and its relationship to other art disciplines. In fact, the photographer always strives to open up access to the subjects that he feels are topical and urgent. They are usually of a deeply personal or even existential nature. Through his own and appropriated photographs, he conducts a dialogue with himself, exclusively in the mode of an image that he allows to slip out of the safety net of conceptual thinking, like soap from wet hands. Thýn wants to act through images, since he is aware that this leads to different findings, just like a poet views reality differently from a scientist. Perhaps this is what his experiment with so-called non-narrative photography was intended to lead to in the past; in the experiment he attempted to overcome the situation aspect of photographs through the gestures of their interpretation through abstraction, specifically decontextualizations and various immediate artistic interventions. For him, photography is a true "medium" that stands between the subject and the artist, enabling him or her to combine content and emotional layers into a single artwork. 

If we were to find a common denominator of the collection that Jiří Thýn presents for the first time at the exhibition entitled Love Life, it would probably be a pictorial contemplation of the possibility and impossibility of distancing from the situations and events that surround us. Is it possible to move away from the tragedies the visual echoes of which reach us from all sides? Is it possible to ascend to the orbit of the Earth and look at everything that happens on it without bias? Is certain timelessness decent to those who live in the present? Doesn’t it make one an unsympathetic, condescending cynic?

Jiří Thýn's photographs do not give us answers because answers always silence questions. They are actually meditations on images of misfortune, death and destruction, phenomena that do not disappear, even if they take on new forms. The high resolution of the digital images offers a dangerously powerful sensory experience. But can one be dazzled by such images for their extraordinary aesthetic qualities? Or are such images meant to intensify the emotional effect, like the highly expressive and naturalistic depictions of suffering in late Gothic paintings and sculptures? Yet those were meant to turn our ancestors to God. What are these modern images meant to turn us to? The imperative in the title turns into uncertainty. Can you love life in all its manifestations, even the heartless and cruel ones? Is it humanly possible? Can one be ordered to do so? Or can it be strongly recommended? Or is Thýn just whispering these words to himself?

So love life if you can.