Dalibor Chatrný – The Skeletons in Interpretations of Photographs by Jindřich Štreit

#2 min Pavlína Vogelová, Jindřich Štreit, Dalibor Chatrný

11. 3. 2021

Interpretations of photographs by Jindřich Štreit, 1996
Interpretations of photographs by Jindřich Štreit, 1996

In 1996, Dalibor Chatrný realized an exceptional series titled Interpretations of Photographs by Jindřich Štreit. It comprises a selection from Štreit’s systematic photographic documentation of the foothills of the Jeseníky Mountains between the 1960s and 1980s, uncovering the authentic and highly specific existential conditions of the local people. Their lives are lived with a firm sense of belonging to their delineated time-space, which reflects a broad range of social and psychological states in all phases of life. One of the dominant authoritative roles is played by the local priest, who accompanies the locals from their birth to their final fulfillment in life.

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Chatrný and Štreit share an interest in the phenomenon of the human being and its journey through life. This is why Chatrný visited Štreit’s darkroom to collect a large number of discarded photographs, unsuitable technically for Štreit, which the artist then transformed into his own form of expressive visual communication, full of translations, re-drawings, perforations and collages.

Through his conceptual intervention into selected photographs from Štreit’s lifelong theme, The Village, Chatrný challenged the photographic documents to enter into a dialogue with the visual layer of the conceptual. In his series, which is bewitching whilst also maintaining elements of humor and hyperbole, Chatrný respects the space of the landscape and the situations photographed by Štreit, only to focus on the figurative object. Through an aggressive painting-over, he embodied the role of the skeleton in the figure, thus metaphorically creating a specific transmutation of the senses, delimiting the natural evolutionary nature of simple being. In this series, the figure of the skeleton represents a notional guide through the reconstruction of thought, feeling and realization of the perception of life. We perceive the skeleton’s imaginative nature as an intermediary; as a guide with whom we descend into the heart of the magic of the creative act. Chatrný’s skeletons, set into situations predetermined by Štreit, transgress the borders of causality. The skeletons pass through the realities of the most banal situations and relationships as if experiencing and realizing their myth of the imaginative game to the full. They draw the spectator in through their most subjective memories and experiences, all the way to the palpable limits of reality; of what, who and why we are. The imaginary field of the skeleton’s miniaturized scenes is clearly delimited, including the role of searching for itself. Even so, existential considerations are brought together with a dark sense of humor.

 

Text: Pavlína Vogelová

 

 

Image captions

All images | Interpretations of photographs by Jindřich Štreit, 1996

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Pavlína Vogelová

is a curator of photography and film at the Historical Museum of the Czech National Museum and a PhD candidate at the Department of Theory and History of Art at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She was previously employed by the Moravian Gallery in Brno. Her research focuses on intermedia elements in documentary art and experimental work in photography and film in relation to history, science, art and education.

Jindřich Štreit

documentary photographer and university lecturer at ITF in Opava. Graduate of the Pedagogical Faculty of Palacký University. He worked as a teacher and principal at schools in Sovinec and Jiříkov. Since 1967, he has realized numerous solo exhibitions both at home and internationally. Beginning in the 1980s, he was an initiator and organizer of regular exhibitions and concerts on the unofficial cultural scene in Sovinec. Throughout his life, he has focused on the social themes of life in the countryside and humanitarian and charity work.

Dalibor Chatrný

visual and conceptual artist, painter, graphic artist and lecturer. Graduate of the Pedagogical Faculty of Charles University and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In addition to his own work as an artist, he was active at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts until 1992, after which he taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology and the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno. His work exhibits the influence of informalism, concretism and kineticism, and he is most at home in abstract and conceptual experiments with structures and spatial transformations.

#38 Death, When You Think About It

A third of the population never talks about death with their loved ones. The society of the global North has lost its natural attitude towards death. Through the ideal of infinite growth, consumer life, and the cult of eternal youth, death gradually became taboo. The presence of death has been delayed by society through a healthcare system focused on improving citizens’ physical condition, thus effecting the greatest possible delay to dying – not only in practice, but also within the collective consciousness of mainstream society. The importance and depth of the process of departure is reduced. One possible result is the suppression of fears connected to the end of life, which make it impossible to experience life in the present. For theorists of photography such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, the medium of photography was itself a kind of death or its imprint. As Sontag points out: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.” The fragile line between death and life has been the subject of art since antiquity. What are the forms taken by the topic today? It might be difficult to go through all the layers of emotion that surround our cessation, but we will try to imagine the diverse moments of encountering death and the different perspectives one might adopt, with the aim, ideally, of accepting respect and gratitude for life, allowing us to perceive it in the present. The art of accepting death at that moment can become the art of living.

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