Articles - David Chandler
Since 1985 Czech photographer Ivan Pinkava has made portraits whose austere elegance has strong affinities with the work of certain nineteenth century portraitists, in particular the Parisian Nadar. Like Nadar, Pinkava‘s interest is focused starkly on the figure alone. His pictures are pared down, all extraneous detail is banished in order to transmit the most powerful sense of a unified mental and physical condition. That this, in Pinkava‘s work, consistently materialises in some unearthly place - rough-walled studio, dimly-lit, dank, underground, somewhere hidden we are led to believe - is our strongest sign of the sitters‘ relation to a social world and of the photographer‘s wider intentions.
Pinkava‘s subjects continually frustrate our efforts to place them - culturaly, historically, or otherwisse. They bare the traces of timeless conflict, scarred, heavy-lidded, emotionally frayed. They are hardened yet also vulnerable and tender. They appear to us as refugees who have gained temporary sanctuary in Pinkava‘s imagination, deprived victims or outsiders burned by excess.
One of Pinkava‘s first portrait series were photographs dedicated to various pillars of European modernism such as Artaud, Mayakovsky, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, and in a sense all his subsequent work makes reference to a towerning modernist legacy of alienated expression. But Pinkava deliberately places his portaits on the brink of overstatement, he refers to his figures as both „holy“ and „foolish“, and it is tempting to read them as „victims“ of an ideology or belief system that has run aground. Pinkava sees them in this way, as fcast adrift,“They are beings from the end of the century...beings of the universe: sexless, disowned and powerfully expressive“.
David Chandler, London 1993