Many artists have discovered a particular piece of countryside and identified it as their very own. For Jan Jedlička, the area was Maremma in south-western Tuscany, a landscape flat as a concrete slab and laced with canals. He first visited Maremma in the late 1970's and has since returned regularly to witness its changes. Thirty years of visits mean, for an artist, a number of drawings, prints, pigments and videos, now gathered by Jan Jedlička into several books.
Among his many activities dedicated to the place, the series of photographs displayed here appears relatively fresh. However, being intrinsic to the whole, it links the remainder of the artist's work in two basic aspects: the subjects of time and consistency. Jedlička took photographs of a specific location over the course of one year, at two-month intervals. The result is 150 photographs recording the changes brought about by the passing seasons and human activities.
The project is remarkable not only for the method applied, the strength of its message and an originality that earns it a place in the history of landscape considered as life space; it also appeals through the artist's approach to the medium employed. If, in traditional terms, the documentary and artistic values of a photograph are in opposition, and the manner in which extension of this polarity is limited, is a concept, then Jedlička smoothly unifies both. The main interest centres upon the installation of the photographs, rather than their individual characteristics. At the same time, a higher symbolic message is delivered from without, at the moment when the horizon lines of the landscape units in all the photographs connect, making up Il Cerchio, the circle. To put it simply, a concept based on a traditional and universal symbol synergises with a modern approach to landscape photography. This generates an experience that is striking in all its aspects, as well as timely reminder of the well-known fact that detached views and freedom are nowadays brought into photography chiefly by those for whom the medium is not the only means of expression.
