For Jan Saudek, without the female body — living and thinking, and guaranteeing continuity over time — the universe would never know itself and would be unknowable to anyone else. He thus shows the universe and ensures the permanence of this vision. The female sex is the very path toward continuity. We should therefore consider the narrative enveloping the universe in a living female body as something that provides the continuity of human life, fertilized and thinking. Here lies the true force of Saudek’s narration: it cuts across all languages and opens History onto a militant counter-narrative where the roles are reversed. Although still oppressed, the woman rewrites the distorted narratives invented by men to their own advantage.
Drawing on more than traumatic experiences of the deportation and death of his loved ones, Saudek created much more than corpses of images. Although bodily remains are often present in his photographs, the artifact of death is not omnipresent. Sexuality becomes the surest “re-rebuke” of Thanatos. The world moves on under scrutiny; at dawn, creation replaces the beginning, the nascent stage proper to the growth of the body.
Humor is often present in Saudek’s work to sublimate the horror and to keep the history of the world and photography from being wrapped up in the same coils of time. Photography contradicts history through a displacement of spectral lines. Women cry, laugh, and moan; they elude saturation by airing their facial expressions. They stimulate no more than the quantity needed for the magnitude of their simulation. Their beauty crushes the horror of ruins and the ugliness of men in visual baroque operas. Anything that does not run aground thus hangs on the women’s every word.
Aesthetic dogmas from various periods and places blend together but stand apart across the different works which subvert the idea of portrait. At the heart of the representation, the work of the artist opens up not only onto dream states but also onto a Lynchian vision of beings. Saudek dives into a universe that is both open and enclosed. As a result, even if representation is the rule, we are far from realism. The visual trap consists in confronting being in its relationship to reality and to its own image. Although the devil of reality is close on the artist’s heels, he is caught up in a formal universe in a quest for an algorithm of the image through scenographies capable of creating a subtle dialectic. The Prague artist employed a paradoxical iconography of classicism, baroque, and modernity which plays on a necessary ambiguity and an effect of disjointedness, and turns the viewer into a being both free and captive.
http://www.saudek.com
