Gallery Caesar, Olomouc 2004
Photos from living magazines are special type of fiction. Perfectly harmonious, to the smallest detail balanced interiors are in the same way unreachable as well as the idea that one day our life would change to a bright idyll seen on advertising posters of travelling agencies. And yet we all desire to have a perfect home, we live under the illusion that several design tricks and properly selected furniture can change our disordered life in the magazine perfection. But these perfect homes from magazines are beautiful, but also in a special way cold and frightening. They look like a place where an accident or even a crime happened. From the elegant stairs one may fall, smoke from the fire can poison us, the sharp edges of furniture and polished concrete floors are suitable for breaking skulls, stainless steel refrigerator resemble morgues most of all.
A sympathetic cur in the middle of a hypermodern interior looks as out of place, as though he would occur on a board of the spacecraft. Thanks to him, we realize that pictures of beautiful homes are also just a kind of unreal images of distant universes, pictures from the realm of fantasy. The dog, man's best friend, makes up a living antithesis in the deserted design perfection but it is also an element in it, which does not belong here despite all its efforts and good manners. Thanks to the Photoshop we can put a dog or ourselves in to any photo, we can perfectly in-retouch to an environment upon which we desire in a hidden part of our heart. The dog casts a realistic shadow and pretends that it smells something but we could not make a home in this way. It is one of the few things which cannot have a virtual form.
A desire for a nice home remains for most of us wistfulness. At the first glance, at any time a comfortable sofa may be lifted somewhere up to the ceiling and to our surprise we find that its cover is not soft velvet, but a rough surface of sandpaper dust. Modern architecture sometimes acts as if it is a neutral background of our life, which does not have any psychological effect. Conversely, we are affected like nothing so much than our everyday environment. We gradually create it by our daily activity in and return it forms us unconsciously every day. Paradoxically, we can realize this best just in pure emptiness of minimalist interiors, the machines for housing, apparatus for surviving, incubators for adults, on which perfect form and function we have little influence.
Tomáš Pospiszyl