Podrobný výpis o publikaci

Jan Pikous was one of the most prominent personalities of the Liberec Studio of Fine Art Photography. After 1992, he achieved success with his exhibitions in Japan. He liked to put the word "horizon" in the titles of his photographs. He knew well how irresistibly one is attracted by the ultimate limit beyond which one can still see. That fatal limitation of vision, which all technology, including photographic technology, only extends but does not abolish. We don't really know what awaits us beyond that horizon. And it is indeed a very strange decision on the part of an artist to try to use photographic technique to capture images that can only be suspected somewhere beyond the boundary where the normally imaginable world ends. It would probably be more natural to paint these images, to describe them in verse or in stories. But perhaps what attracted Jan Pikous to photography was the fact that one unconsciously believes in it. And even though we can see exactly where it can no longer be trusted, it is the tension that is inspiring. What is shown in the photograph somehow still remains "as if" real to us. Jan Pikous was not reluctant to make use of everything that was interesting to him from these currents, but the decisive thing for him remained the idea he was aiming at. As Jaromír Typlt wrote: "If we wanted to name in one word what unites his photographs, with all the variety of the methods he chose, perhaps the word 'illumination' would be suggested. With Pikous, things appear in a strange, mysterious luminosity. It is reminiscent of the feelings we may know from those moments when we find ourselves alone in a landscape and it suddenly changes around us - but also with us. It brightens up or turns grey, something permeates the whole of it, so that it suddenly feels like a scene that transports us somewhere or prepares us for something. It is not surprising that Pikous has been an avid hiker all his life. All those imaginary landscapes and lingering horizons in his pictures were perhaps just an attempt to get closer to how surreal the landscape can be when we can actually see it."