Jan Saudek - Tapa dura

La Repubblica ceca è sempre stata considerata terra di magia e di mistero, la patria di alchimisti, artisti e bohemiènne, tutti creatori di fantastici mondi di immaginazione. Il famoso fotografo ceco Jan Saudek non fa eccezione e con la sua arte persegue la realizzazione della sua visione unica. Per oltre 40 anni Saudek ha creato un mondo fotografico parallelo, una dimora a due dimensioni carica di desiderio, colori e brama. La forza senza tempo delle sue foto dai colori aggiunti a mano sta nella composizione poetica e nel forte linguaggio pittorico. Rifiutando il concetto di bellezza tradizionale, nei suoi famosi nudi, Saudek ritrae donne anziane e grasse, bambini; gente reale in una sorta di tableaux vivants che ci ricordano i primi film surreali.

The Czech Republic has long been a land of mystery and magic, home to alchemists, artists, and the original bohemians, all of them weavers of spells, creators of fantastic worlds of the imagination. Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For nearly four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful - at times ribald - pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Rejecting the traditional beauty in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely colored and almost mythical theater of dreams. Covering his debut in the 1950s through his lesser-known work to recent images, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution," fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have.