Michal Macku
"One creates to communicate what can not be expressed in any other way. Then comes the need to describe, to define." Michal Macku
Michal describes and defines ...
"From the end of 1989 I have used my own creative technique which I have named "Gellage" -- the ligature of gelatin and collage. The technique resides in applying layers of exposed and fixed photographic emulsion on paper. This transparent substance gives the opportunity to deform and reshape the original photographic image in new meanings and relations.
By pressing the button on the camera I catch and freeze one moment from the continual time which I then transpose and bring to life again. By soaking it and removing it from the base, for a short moment, I enable it to continue in time again.
It's as if I branched out reality into some self-existing world which lives at least for a short while in the process of the birth of a Gellage (before it dries up and dies again). This way I can combine images from different time periods and put them into a new context in a new common time. I free them from all previous relations and give them a new life. And everything, the whole history has meaning for me.
It is a laborious technology, which often uses many negatives for one image. It doesn't give any possibility to make more absolutely identical prints: Each copy of the print is an original art work. I may make 12 numbered prints of each image. But each must vary.
I use the nude human body, mostly my own body, in my pictures. Through the photographic process of gellage, this concrete human body is compelled to meet with abstract surroundings and distortions.
This connection is most exciting for me and helps me to find new levels of humanness in the resulting work. Its charm is similar to that of cartoon animation, but it is not a trick. It is very important for me to be aware of the history of a picture and to have a sense of direct contact with its reality. My work places "body pictures" in new situations, new contexts, new realities, causing their "authentic" reality to become relative .
I am interested in questions of moral and inner freedom. I do what I feel, and only then do I begin to meditate on what the result is. I am often surprised by the new connections I find in it. Naturally, I start out with a concrete intention, but the result is often very different.
I have always been looking for new means of expression. Step by step, I am discovering almost unlimited possibilities of work with loosened gelatin. Each photographic picture means a specific touch with concrete reality for me. Each image is one captured level of real time.
The technique which I am using, helps me to take one of these time sheets, and release a figure from it -- a human body -- and this makes it depend on time, again.
Gellage has something extra compared to classical photography and that's structure. Real, physical structure which you can perceive by touch. And one other thing that is very important to me is the history of the origin of each picture; the fact that I enter the process of its making with my hands and that the final form, or shape, comes into being with me standing there, manipulating and creating the picture. And all the photographic work prior to that was primarily only preparation. Essential, but preparation nevertheless. And the actual "act of creation" is similar to a piece of clay which you use for sculpting. That's the primary difference -- the collage in the word Gellage."
Michal Macku
Michal Macku's originality in the art of photography will likely be discussed for decades to come - he is a rising star - a child of Communist oppression who did not realize the extent of the restrictions placed on arts and culture in Prague until the oppression ended. And the timing has served him well.
Michal Macku began to make photographs in 1978. He graduated from the Technological Faculty of the Polytechnic Institute in
Since 1992, Michal has been working on his own, after careers in research and teaching. Creating the process of gellage has been a breakthrough for him as the results of his work continue to teach and surprise him.
