Seven Oaks Magazine.

Tichy, November 18, 2006 – January 14, 2007, at Presentation House Gallery, 333 Chesterfield Avenue, North Vancouver, BC.

Women, the central subject of Miroslav Tichy’s black and white photographs, are often blurry figures — underexposed and overdeveloped — but they are also confident, unapologetic, and beautiful.

The exhibition “Tichy” on now at Presentation House Gallery represents the North American public gallery premier of the works of this eighty years old, recently “discover” Czech artist. This exhibition follows a major solo show at the Kunsthaus in Zürich last summer.

While these photographs can be viewed as a study of the female form, beyond their immediate subject, they reveal a quiet and forceful sensibility. A particularly striking image is of a group of women running through a field, the sun highlighting their wind blown hair, figures reminiscent of horses in mid gallop. Another image shows a leg disappearing behind a wall of a swimming pool, as seen behind a wired fence. Some photographs capture moments of sheer abandonment, others can be viewed as works of intense observation or products of an obsessive voyeuristic impulse.

The method of the artist is part of what lends this work its vitality. Using his homemade cameras — assembled from paper tubes, beer bottle caps, rubber bands with lens cut from plexiglass and polished with ash and toothpaste — Tichy would expose roughly 100 frames a day. Tichy claims that the way he works is determined only by nature, and the amount he photographs by the length of the day. He leaves much to intuition. To belabor the issue of methods would be to miss the poetry of this hermit artist philosopher.

Aside from the photos, one can gather from artist Roman Bauxbaum’s video portrait of Tichy, which accompany the exhibition, that the artist’s own struggles with authorities and authoritarianism, particularly during the Communist era in Czechoslovakia, has resulted in a life guided by a deep playful philosophical skepticism. Unlike most other artists, Tichy could care less if he is shown, another sign of his utter rejection of social conventions, regulations, or measures of success. In this sense, the unassuming blurry figures in his photos produced through such compulsive and unorthodox means are also deeply radical and political. Tichy’s ability for abandonment makes us question our own attachments.

The genius of Tichy is his ability to convey this intensity with a touch of lightness, a quietly whispered invitation for rebellion. For Tichy, life is only an idea, and his are as good as anyone else’s.