6.7.-4.9.2011

Švolík’s physical poems
Do the author’s presented photo-collages not bring only another reproduction of the world, in which real elements are transformed into a magical whole, a visual magnetic field? Can a memory-based photographic medium create a playful, poetic, sensitive world, where dream, beauty and desire are awakened, where “Flowers of Delight” can blossom? Does this fascination with the female body not merely contribute to a further terror of eroticism, from magazine covers to art galleries?

(From Birth to Death, 2009)
Is our river of life merely a silent march from a diamond to a square, from red to black (do only brides remain white?)? Is it at all possible to create living cells, the living tissue of an image using programming devices? Is this a mythical dance of bodies in an algorithm of digital time? Who passes through the gateway pays nothing? Is this mental map of the mosaic of life merely an admission of divergence, in which man is only another brick in the wall? Is the pixelisation of an image not merely a snapshot of life – a fragment, a shard, a shred of the mystery of the world? Isn’t history full of men who depict women? Isn’t the camera merely a man’s tool   for hunting in a picturesque colonisation of the landscape of women?

(The Milky Way, 2009)  
How should we approach the female form: women, stars, galaxies and nebulae in the universe of the studio? To show outstretched bodies and their parts, full of milk shining out in the heavens? Levitating nanoparticles, Newton’s apples of sinful beauty (probably)? Vibrant quarks/crumbs from a divine feast? What strange light do they radiate, that they constantly overwhelm us, that they give us strength and make life colourful?  Do we, in a chaotic network, not yearn for a womanly, domesticated Great Bear? Does she not represent a model of the universe’s platform of the birth   of life and a black hole? Is a woman nothing more than superfluous meat around a black hole? Only upon passing into other rooms: wound, womb...
 
(Big Woman Little Man, 2010)
Isn’t every miniscule endeavour of man to disturb the grandiosity of the bodymage of women in vain?  Does it not spoil the symmetry of these monuments of eternal beauty, marble torsos without antique gestures? How do we approach the poem that is a woman without any prior model at hand? Perhaps: lady, maiden, laden, haven? Is there not something smooth, liquid and pliant on the firm architecture of female corpuses? And do men trust only right angles and their operations? Vigorous impacts and severances that wish to “penetrate them all”? Does not every young cartographer of the female body intrude upon the glory of exposure to the skin? Doesn’t Malevič’s Black Square intrude unnecessarily into the womb of women? A curve is formed here: from birth – back to our origins as primates?

Are Švolík’s three new series not merely a photographic metaphor of time, light and the female body? Is photography no more than a collection of dead moments –       a “corpse of time”? Is it no more than a “gallery of light” of a world created from poetry? Do men not create photographs only in order to be able to touch women’s bodies not only with their hands, but also by techno-images? Are these not the last records of man – a genetically unmodified author?

b.skid