Village Romance

The perspectives of two boys are being followed and subsequently, as if unwittingly, captured in an environment with a fire. Two photographs become the perspectives of two different children in the area of a forest and Mediterranean drought. Tomáš Hrůza, in the role of a photographer clenched by the surroundings, appears in the flash of the only moving image of the exhibition, which is a robotic video flashing in fragments. We, as the viewers, are watching continuous flashes of inquisitory shots of a landscape and a fire nearby a building. The moment of recollection and reconstruction of possible situations is spread out at the exhibition between three images, which are supplemented by an object – a large drum, kettledrum – which becomes a part of the overall image of the exhibition and at the same time some sort of a ritual instrument designated for the literal transformation of its rhythm.
The photographic work of Tomáš Hrůza is closely tied with his trips and returns. The result consists of travel probes, taxonomies of natural motives, which make up a very important part of the photographic cycles of the artist. The desire to settle down in a rural landscape is evoked in the pictures as the artist’s romantic image of a life surrounded by elements, which he especially develops in the current exhibition. In his photographic cycles, Tomáš Hrůza has often worked with the symbolic meaning and the archetype of natural motives and landscape in general, through which he walks as a random passer-by, observer and consequently also the author. These, although biographic notes leave a significant trace in his current view of a village, where he is gradually shifting to in his artist, as well as human steps, or where he has actually already moved to.

Martin Mazanec