Dance with the Devil - Vitkova

Devil has many looks and countless numbers of faces. Who dances with the devil to be at the mercy of death and runs the risk of darkness and curse. From the devils eddy break out the gallows songs, dance macabre of gothic, baroque memento mori, decadent vanity, Opus Dei of rock.                                                                     
The cycle “Dance with the Devil” is the honour for Simon Wiesenthal, the man, who lived for justice, not for death. Radomír Škoda made the best of the documentary power and energy of photography. He confronts spectators with the direct views to the empty of eye orbit of eternity. Nearly more can death not come, nearly more can nothingness not come and in is not possible to bring more nearly our past. Some photos rose on the places of cult of death, in the ossuaries, they try to get even with the unavoidable physical end of the body. Other photos were made in Lidice, Terezin and Auschwitz Birkenau, in the locations stigmatized of wilful death from hands of human monstrosity. What gets a man to go to these damned places? Perhaps it, what urges the other ones to try to forget these places.

The story of death from the hands of devil goes under the coat of photography to another dimension. This dimension is cult, critical and erotic, true and banal, impressive and authentic. It demonstrates that dead is photogenic. Creator wants to make right the present times with short memory. He does not moralize only for morality, he does not remind us our blames for his pleasure and he does not long for to be a sacrifice. He is not Hamlet mediating like a clown with the death´s-head of Yorick. The eye of Lautréamont and Dalí ´s Maldoror , the Lord of horror bring us near to the last things of man. The last supper, transports without returns, interval between life and emptiness, much money and clean scientific perfection of kinds of death.
The garden of paradise changes to the garden of torture, the last date is the last supper, death is a randes-vous and it is impossible not to go there. Sadness and dusky curse, eternity, inseparable couple of antithesis of Cain and Abel, brotherhood only in death not in life. Cry face to face of gloomy death in the eyes sprightly grinning bat, nightly existence of horror. Soup with varied label, the gift with profit for somebody else. The death comes like this.

Martina Vitkova
Gallery of Modern Art in Hradec Kralove