I had the same dream twice. I was standing at the foot of a hill, observing the fading rays of light at sunset. The gently undulating landscape emanated peace and calmness, it was getting dark. Suddenly, a column of orange-yellow-black smoke appeared on the horizon and started rising up quickly to the skies. A few moments later, a deafening detonation sounded; a war had broken out. When I woke up, a feeling of something well known and familiar appeared in my mind; in both cases. This feeling was so persistent and conspicuous that I started searching for the image from the dream. I wanted to discover where on earth I had already seen it. I went through magazines, websites, old newspapers stored in the toilet. Each interior fills up with possible meanings. The place where we live slowly becomes a self-reflecting system of signs. Sooner or later, all things around us can take up the strength of a sign or become a sign itself. It is only a matter of time until we start noticing it.
A dream is our personal interior, a place which we return to every night. An internal living area that takes up the form of the things which we live through during the day and which we expect at night. An interior the discrepancy of which is so obvious that it is almost impossible to doubt that a dream is a kind of second life. In a dream, everything says the word “I”. Each utterance changes into an impenetrable speech figure. The linguistics of a dream. Shapes resembling cryptic scores or blank maps start appearing in front of your eyes. Fragments of a foreign script start emerging from an indistinct background. A carefully elaborated dictionary of images the definite meanings of which suddenly turn into an intangible chimera as soon as you wake up. A typography of a dream. Plans of non-existing buildings. A cardboard model in an unknown scale. The architecture of a dream. And finally, a luminous imprint of a web, the threads of which shine and light up the darkness. The photography of a dream.
The exhibition titled Late At Night I Fall Asleep represents a certain form of a reductionist language which does not refer to the minimalist tradition but draws on the aesthetics of Orphic Cubism to which it applies its own dictate of unconsciousness. The resulting form can be described as an exhibition-dream. In the beginning, there was a real story not lacking the aspects of suspense and humour; a story which had been made into a film but which I hadn’t seen. A story which I am not going to narrate. It is necessary to get hold of things while they sleep. The result is reductionism characterised by dream-like need verging on obsession for always one particular motif only. A motif which keeps returning in the same way as a dream does and reminds us of the possibilities of other beginnings.
(The text includes two free quotations from the Czech translation of the book The Perfect Crime)
Jiří Havlíček
