jaroslav malík

My little prose Rose

A studio covered with dust, a glass frame 30×40. Im putting a bottle of beer into my gob, biting into a speck and gaping at an upside –down picture –of course looking in the glass frame. One or two hours after exposure, sometimes after half a day / why do we say then that a photo is the art of the moment/. Because each picture is composed of tens, nowadays of hundreds of shots, you can imagine how much speck Ill have. A still – life means for me an endless passage of time. People, stories and things are coming, fading into one another or passing by, disappearing or keeping. Still – lives are old things with their fates. A broken wooden clock, a clock face in decay. Metal, glass, ceramic fragments. Yellowish photos from Austria-Hungary. A tailors dummy eaten by a moth, archaic irons, lamps, inkpots, picture frames, animal fossils, cleaning up the cemetery after the All Saints Day. Fragments of the things used long time ago, then, discarded, thrown away, forgotten somewhere.
I am a fatalist. I know that all the events happened because of me. I bought the things, I got them, I stole or found them somewhere in a loft, in a cellar, in a rubbish-heap, in a junk sale. I am fascinated by junk, by some flotsam and jetsam. By their fates. I bring them back to life. To new reality, to their fantastic, imaginative impressiveness. I will put all of them to a cycle, which can never be finished, to “My little prose Rose. Later I remake the photos again, I add or take away some. Never any of them were, are or will be done. As people, things and events and their relationships change, I change in the same way, so I have to edit my lovely photos as well. My wooden plate chamber and brass lens are as old as all the things. The positive material in reels was bought before the Revolution /the last one, of course, not the October one/. And what is in the photos? Still-lives. What else? My feelings. The same as when I wake up and forget my dream immediately. Everyone has some dreams and feelings after waking up. A viewer, please, come to your own conclusion.
My pictures do not have names. I am not able to think them out. I do not want to do that. The still – life is an escape from the chaos, from the human bedlam, it is the way of a searching for its order within disorder in the postmodern time. It may be a discovery of the fixed point in the universe. It is a relief and a shield against stupidity, Barbie dolls, against stupid opposition agreements and endless television serials. It is not only fun for me, but something which sounds a little stupid – it is my own reflection.

Yours faithfully Jaroslav Malik – photographer, teacher, cyclist, cactus grower etc.