Antonín Tesař, a man who at first glance appears shy and timid, found himself among the three authors of the exhibition collection titled "Provocateurs of Czech Photography" in 2017 by chance. At the beginning of the third millennium, he provokes as strongly as Jan Saudek did since the 1970s and Taras Kuščynskyj did a decade before him. All three dared to significantly deviate from the norm with their work. To break established customs. To provoke. While Kuščynskyj did so by celebrating the romantic connection between the naked beauty of women and nature, and Saudek with the ostentatious animality of the human race, Tesař migrates through a universe of peculiar perversion, where life and death, pain and pleasure, normality and difference, physicality and spirituality, even disgust and beauty intertwine and rush towards an irritatingly shocking hybridism. And although the works of all three evoke sharply opposing reactions, Antonín Tesař is a prime example of a creator who elicits either a clear feeling of disgust or the exact opposite. And nothing in between. The images of Antonín Tesař stand out from the broad stream of contemporary staged photographic creation, not only in the Czech Republic, with something difficult to describe but urgent. As if they were all enveloped by a peculiar specter of mortality. Threatened, limited life...
