Vanishing Points

Jiří Mědílek, Krajina


Écrire aperception purement visuelle, c’est écrire une phrase dénuée de sens. Comme de bien entendu. Car chaque fois qu’on veut faire faire aux mots un véritable travail de transbordement, chaque fois qu’on veut leur faire exprimer autre chose que des mots, ils s’alignent de façon à s’annuler mutuellement. C’est, sans doute, ce qui donne à la vie tout son charme.

(Beckett, Le Monde et le Pantalon)

Úbězníky. Úpadek. Degenerace. Mizení. Vymření. Nepřítomnost. Zaniknutí. Vyloucění.

Vanishing points. Decline. Degeneration. Disappearance. Extinction. Absence. Expiry. Exclusion.

[Abjectly gives up effort to reproduce Czech diacritics.]

These landscapes seem to have no past. The traces are swept away. One thinks of the Broumov region, one of the places where M. lives, and how that land was cleaned of Sudeten Germans after the war. But even this is to say too much. I imagine M.’s annoyance, or even boredom, at my mentioning the Sudetens. When you present absence in your paintings, then it is unfair to say what is absent. It could be Sudetens – their community, their architecture – and equally it could be any other thing or people possible. Any worldly thing.

{Ends}

From Justin Quinn’s text accompanying the painter’s images in Jiří Mědílek, Obrazy (Prague, Opus), a ravishingly pleasing book.

See and read more of and about Mědílek here (in Czech).