NYAB Event - “YOU. Never Too Close” Exhibition

“YOU. Never Too Close” Exhibition

Czech Center New York / The Bohemian National Hall

This event has ended.

Look at these photographs.
They capture a world that seems improbably neat. A life that appears always ready to pose in front of the lens. Nevertheless, after being captured this world lives on with the same casualness as before.
Photographic images by four kindred spirits evoke the yearning for beauty of the disturbingly anachronistic Pre-Raphaelites. They speak through something possibly too beautiful to bear, and at the same time not far-fetched enough to be hyperbolic. Their intuitive manner of work represents a subconscious opposite of the speculative and rationalistic approach to art. The artists balance boldly on the edge of formal aestheticism, however their efforts are justified by the authenticity of life and the images derived from it that permeate the photographs. To use Andrei Tarkovsky’s words, beauty is understood here as a symbol of truth, which justifies its presence in the photographs.
Seekers of Beauty
They surround themselves with an aesthetically sealed environment that shapes them in everything they do. A reality of its own kind. Strolls around unknown towns, sitting in cafes and wanderings in desolate landscapes with refuge in a quiet house without electricity are accompanied by obsessive longing for making everything present through photography. Networks of relationships defining these places preserve memories of childhood, lost and found friendships, new muses and loves and desires of the distant future. Russian philosopher S.L. Frank wrote that “I is unthinkable without You, but this opposite is reconciled in We.” Human beings in the photographs are observed with the loving (not spying) eye of a person with a camera who longs to capture them in moments when their experience of beauty is absolutely true. The photographs thus make up a pictorial universe for love in various forms: eros, agape and philia.
The subjects of all these photographs are people to whom the photographer says: YOU. The photographer who is not capable of keeping a sufficient distance from the world in which he or she is immersed, and yet they are never too close. For that matter, you can’t get any closer with a camera.
~Jan Fišer