Photographer Tereza Kabůrková /1980/, a graduate of Pavel Baňka’s studio at the Faculty of Applied Art and Design at the University of Jan Evangelista Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem, presents a new series of still-lifes at Galerie Laboratorio.

By their very nature, still-lifes are motionless and static – a mummified representation of the present. Their primary purpose is decorative. The still-life is a light genre encoded with a gloomy content - demise, ruin, ephemerality /“nature morte”/. Tereza does not stage her still-lifes; instead, her method resembles the doing by not doing of the Eastern masters. “I’m just at home, looking around. And when I feel I see a motif, then I take a picture of it.”

In the spirit of Eastern philosophy, which views man as an integral part of his environment, she sits quietly doing nothing, surrounded by the intimately familiar items found in her flat. Isolated within the seclusion of home, an in-between time when it irrevocably becomes a former home, she experiences the world unmediated, through the most everyday items - flowers, a squash, pears, random arrangements on the table or the windowsill. She does not interfere into the natural course of events. Photographing by not photographing, she contemplates the flow of time, eternalizing the vacuum between the receding past and a future that /for now/ remains without a vision. The Zen masters called the creative spirit that arises from a nostalgic sadness arising from the impermanent and changing nature of the world, by the Japanese term letoru aware. During moments of sadness and nostalgia when looking at the most trivial things, the artist experiences a private satori. Using his eyes, he fixes in place the ordinary, worldly and concrete, liberating himself through the discovery that time does not exist, only an expansive and peaceful emptiness.

Although she is a professional printer who enlarges photographs by leading figures of contemporary Czech photography, in her own work Tereza consciously avoids perfection. In the eternal struggle involving perception and the reproduction of nature, she again leans towards the East. European tradition analyses the landscape from the viewpoint of the surveyor or architect – “everything in nature is modeled according to the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. You have to learn to paint with reference to these simple shapes; then you can do anything...” was Cézanne’s mantra. This dry, constructivist approach is in direct opposition to Chinese landscape painting, which engages in a careful observation of nature, which finds not regularity but unpredictable asymmetry, and prefers anarchy over order. Just as the Chinese brushstroke is gnarled, random, and accompanied by splotches, Tereza does not retouch her photographs. Doing so would remove not only any so-called “defects,” but also the moment of spontaneity. Tereza accentuates imperfection, vitality, craftsmanship. Working in the darkroom, she enlarges her black-and-white and color negatives by hand, fixing her emotions on paper. Using controlled chance and the right chemicals, she uses the chosen tonality to develop and evoke innate emotions. Even if the pears rot, the petals wilt and fall from the flowers, and a different window frames a different horizon, there is no reason to get upset. If there is no past nor future, nor anyone for whom this moment would be present, than what is it? Before Fa-tsang drew his last breath, he heard a squirrel on the roof. “This is it,” he said, “and nothing more.”