TICHY

One of those incredible stories. A story about blurred, underexposed photos and homemade cameras. A story about the bodies of women, pictures taken with the eyes of a confessed voyeur. He sneaks a look through the fence of the men’s bath to get a glimpse of the ladies, tolerating the ubiquitous grid pattern inscribed on the obscure bodies of his victims by the measures of decency. Perhaps one of the strangest, most touching contributions to the gallery of “bathers” to sublime the longing for bodies in the occidental history of art. The incredible story also has its rift, the rupture that simply occurs without cause. Miroslav Tichy is not naive. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague and was an avantgarde painter in the 1950s, not without risk in communist Czechoslovakia, and yet he had his entourage that admired him. Until it simply occurred: the rift, the rupture, becoming an outcast, someone who belongs nowhere. Tichy kept on painting; then he built his first camera, refining the prototype to whatever extent the yield of scrap allowed.

Ever since he has been on the hunt, taking pictures of that which he once painted: women. What should we call this, here, in the context of art? The breakthrough of an impulse? An obsession?

The art of a misfit? What should we call pictures – the author of which remains unknown – hidden in subconsciousness? The incredible story takes place somewhere deep down inside, and yet far out, in a dimension for which we have no categories of expla-nation, comprehension, or even description.

Harald Szeemann, 2004