photographer ANTONIO MUÑOZ MOLINA 20/02/2010
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without leaving your village, Kyjov, a small provincial town in Moravia, Miroslav Tichý, managed to live as a castaway on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe covered with clothes that were gradually becoming rags, her face hidden after a wild fur shining in the increasingly astute and clear eyes. Miroslav Tichý, who had been a promising young artist in Prague, in 1945, in the brief period of freedom after the war, between the defeat of the Germans and the imposition of communist rule, first reported the sinking of mental disorder, then the political harassment, but in his photographs of youth there is nothing to anticipate the figure affable hermit and misanthrope who would roam the streets and parks Kyjov from the sixties. In the photos of youth, Tichý is a tall, blond hair, with a Slavic face open with one of those suits they wear light, loose in Hollywood films antifascist refugees from Central Europe, Paul Henreid in Casablanca. By 1968 the clothing she wore was a confusion of shreds secured with ropes and pieces of wire, and one of the occasions where the police ended the report on the state of hygiene occupied some sixty pages, and included the number I had lice in the hair and the presence in a pocket, a live cockroach.
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"The photos were happening, without my doing anything, just pull the trigger" Miroslav Tichý
A police would look every time he visits communist dignitaries to the city or on the eve of public holidays on 1 May, the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution. He waited, sitting next to a small suitcase in which he kept a change of clothes in the growing chaos in which they had become over the years their tiny house, which was also his artist's studio and photo lab. In a police van the police had taken to the psychiatric prison and there he remains locked up until they spent the holidays or the officer was on official visits. He cut his hair and beard, bathed him, made him change his clothes, and as she went out she started sinking again delayed. What he did not was never off camera, perhaps because they imagined that this artifact made of cardboard, bits of plastic, spools of thread, rusty sheets of beer, old underwear elastic, could serve some purpose other than as a distraction for fantasies of a madman.
In his youth, Miroslav Tichý wanted to be a painter. Matisse and admired Picasso's neoclassical period: his drawings of women, especially, graceful nudes that were halfway between the solvency of academic drawing and immediacy in the observation of life. Like Degas, he preferred to draw from memory, the line does not pursue what is in front of the eyes, but it has managed to retain the memory. At the Academy of Art in Prague, with the advent of the communist regime, were banned nude models: the duty of the artists would paint tough workers now working with monkeys, raising his fist, holding hammers.
Prague political pressure was too stifling. More convenient carefully removed to a province. Unable to settle in conformity Tichý chose to be a rare or crazy, between hermit and clown, a beggar who achieved their freedom of shipwrecked not asking or needing anything. Had a studio and expelled him and threw him into the street his paintings and sketchbooks. No danger of that would happen again if he stopped painting. To avoid being removed once the study was not to have the solution.
But neither needed. Every drawing has already been drawn, all the pictures are painted now. Drawing, painting, canvas, paper, were commitments, distractions aside formal than one of the only thing that really mattered, the visible reality. The beauty of the art was hoped for at any corner in the middle of the street lines and shapes, contrast, balance of composition. What is missing was a model, frozen in academic gestures, fed up with standing still. In any young woman about to walk down the street or sit on a bench across the legs or taking off their heels to massage sore foot was the catalog of all the arts, women always seen from a distance, perhaps alarmed by the Figure shaggy appearance and family, perhaps with a certain indulgence smiling funny or too absorbed in their thoughts not repair it, let alone in his room, often hidden by the rags. He left
to walk with the first light of dawn and returned only to that room was more like a hole in the declining afternoon sun. It took a hundred photos per day. The photos were happening, without my doing anything, just press the shutter. The lens was a polished piece of Plexiglas with a mixture of toothpaste and cigarette ash. In the photos and sometimes revealed noticeable traces of their fingers dirty, damp patches of soil in which the piling, the bites of the mice and moths. The framed sometimes using cut pieces of cardboard or underlined with a pen or a pen a line that had become too blurred, or that he would like to highlight. The photos do not have titles and are dated. The coarseness of the procedure, poor materials, the rush, the abandonment, effect of time, are attributes of the delicate wonder, the spell between carnal and melancholy of the female presence. Neither the city nor the landscape there for Miroslav Tichý: only women, almost always a bit blurry, the effect of distance or the mechanism of the camera rustic handmade women seen from behind, walking down a sidewalk, sitting in a coffee with legs crossed and her skirt above her knees, lying in the sun poolside, smiling from behind a fence, down a car, exchanging confidences with their heads together, collecting the hair on the neck, exiting the water with a dazzle of sun on the brown skin away when cast interviews head to one side before kissing a man. Philosopher rags like Velázquez Democritus, with which it shares the toothless smile, Tichý says, incredulous that their old photos to look around the world and are now in an exhibition in New York, everything is not exactly the same sleep, anonymity and fame, and portrayed real women, ghosts matched by the passage of time. To succeed it is only necessary to do something worse than anyone in the world, he says, died of laughing, in a documentary, drinking rum in a glass opaque with grime, like a very old Robinson Crusoe and not abandon their island of garbage.
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