Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Friday 21 March 2008
There are artists that we cannot understand unless we know the places in which they’ve worked. It would
be unthinkable to conceive Atget without Paris, Weegee without New York, and Ansel Adams without its
enchanting mountains. The bond between Jan and Prague is evident even before confirmation of his
biographical dates. The Czechoslovakian photographer has symptomatically not moved from Prague. He
won’t be undermined by evil regimes, a sixties and eighties spring repression, the said institutional
ostracism. His world is in a studio inhabited by bodies capable of giving life to his incredible stories affection
and sex, of fascination and repulsion, of tonic muscles and burning flesh. All of Jan Saudek’s photography is
a great theatre.
Born in Prague in 1935, Saudek cultivated his dream to become a photographer since an adult. Self‐taught,
viscerally independent and hostage of the communist regime, he worked as a photographer for years in the
cellar of his house (using the scraped off part of the room as his backdrop), vigorously achieving moral
norms and social rules to follow his passion. And he mastered photography, which managed to free his
delirium, his indignations: a mental grid, of the heart, of sex. Through his black and white shots (which he
began to colour by hand from ’77), a grotesque and intriguing eroticism of his nudes are coarsely shown
both in its form and content.
His images explore dreams more than reality, although strongly characterized by bloody subjects always
expressed by the person drawn, and by the use of hand coloured images. These images produce a non‐
realistic and honorific effect on oneself, even if Saudek’s choice was dictated by accidental difficulty of
dangerous findings and coloured developments.
His photography has been a celebration of characteristics of human nature since the seventies: human
beings, woman, father, mother, lovers and babies and adolescents. The passing of time, birth and death. In
the eighties, a series of antithetical elements entered his imagination: love and hate, beauty and ugliness,
youth and old age. They are all an animalistic aggression that as such stroked his masochism.
Saudek is a perfectionist and a proud artist who offers “classical” images as his art and capacity to
penetrate the world in a room. The art critic Vittorio Sgarbi describes the artist as “more decadent than
Oscar Wilde, more elegant than Dante Gabriel Rossetti, more exhausted than Ferdinand Khnopff, more
spiritual than Rilke, more theatrical than D’Annunzio”. But is Saudek a painter or a photographer? Does he
paint or photograph? For sure, the reason we are advised to see his work is because they are absolutely
unified. Finally a true and proper anthology of the Czech artist, director, makeup artist and sometimes
cinematographer is to be presented in Italy. After the debated decision not to exhibit his work at the Royal
Palace in Milan, the exhibition is scheduled for Pac lasting until the 27th April 2008. The show that is
curated by Enrica Viganò, has 80 photos lined up in which Saudek explores different drives: suicide
attempts, claustrophobia, sexual perversions, shyness, exhibitionism, irony, grotesque eroticism, himself
and his lovers after his wife, and he made them pose for all of the pieces, from the large girl that jumps
rope with the maiden from her proud body that uses the rope to escape the camera, above clouds towards
the blue sky. The early times are significant of his journey with the series “You could call it love”: it resumes
only people close to him, and his subjects have always been family members and friends. He creates
tableaux vivants to set the scenes of his stories because each single image is truly a complete story. He
expresses the sense of his work when he affirms that: “every single photograph cannot be the apotheosis
of human beings. In the best of cases, it can be a small stone in the wall of an immense temple. A stone
with which man can praise his world”. Each image is a fragment of our drives, of our secret desires, of our
will and fantasies, of refusals and bonds, of deliria and passions that Saudek constructs with experience of
his own intimate life.