I started out by taking pictures of people, but as though from another, older civilization: the inhabitants of coastal areas, the last barbarians of our time. Intuitively, I made my way south, to countries which have their own peculiar light (the south of France, India, equatorial Africa, Martinique). On returning to Bohemia, I had no idea how to follow up on the singularity and charm of these countries. In the end I found what I was looking for here: there was the foreign-looking area of České středohoří (the ‘Bohemian Middle Mountains’) around Terezín, which I depicted in my book entitled Pevnost (‘Fortress’), and the polar bears with their dreams and illusions, which inspired me to produce a set of photographs called Bear Illusion. I had made the transition from black-and-white documentary to the much bolder world of imaginative photography. I photographed worlds which were forsaken and forgotten, devastated and fragmentary: overgrown gardens and cemeteries, gloomy castles with a hint of Allan Edgar Poe, and decadent worlds of Baroque statues, bizarre natural scenery, and glasshouse jungles. I was drawn by their mysteriousness, their silence, but also by flashes of beauty which are so difficult for me to find in today’s world. When I think about it, I am probably doing nothing more than trying to penetrate through the visible world until I reach the dark side, the side that is hidden. My photographic pictures often resemble what I see in my dreams. For me, dreaminess and poetry are the key that opens the door to fading or lost worlds. It was put succinctly by the poet Otokar Březina: ‘…the invisible world pervades the visible world. Art reaches into the interpretation of objects through the freedom of the dream. The light which flows over things is purer and more mysterious than the light of our sun; it is the other, spiritual side of this light.’
The words in the form of a ‘magic formula’ which you can read in the introduction to my presentation are among those terms which are characteristic of what I am looking for and what you can look for with me.
‘What drew me to Petra Růžičková’s photographs at first glance was the penetrative yet subtle distance from the naivety of photographers who consider their work to be an act of correspondence and are not aware that the only thing a photograph has in common with reality is the chasm which separates the depiction from the depicted, and that this caesura is a blessing, not a curse. Petra Růžičková often arranges colours in layers, not in the technical sense of the word, but as the result. The space of her photographs is created from zones and planes layering the sense. This is a space of many horizons, in which there are innumerous folds of significance and where we see the mutual mirroring of planes.’
Michal Janata
‘The photographs of Petra Růžičková are reminiscences in the Platonic spirit, more than just memories. The artist, as though intentionally, has become resigned to all the laws of portrayal and ordinary photographic methods and processes. In the framework of the current paradigm, and based on a knowledge of the history of art and photography, she creates a mirror image of the world as a suggestively internal statement about herself, about the people she meets and passes and whose shadows sink into the outlines of objects, living flora and fauna, the stones of human and natural architecture. It is from here, from a natural, sometimes almost animist, but also mystically touched initial position, that her path begins towards an art which does not live in the enchantment of a moment, but is found always higher or lower on the temporal vertical, in the past or in the future.’
