CGD

Ladislav Kyllar is a member of a generation that reflects with a certain gusto-in-evitability on the experience of its increasingly extreme position between the opulence on the screen and the scattered containers in their unexpanded reality, between the pulled-up sweatpants of stained covid couches against a backdrop of zoom phone calls and handbags stuffed to bursting with iconicity by the concentrated investment of the creative, marketing and sales teams of international corporations. And in London, where Kyllar is currently based, he manages to be much close to this lived disproportion and finds more space for realization than in Ústí nad Labem, where he graduated, or in Prague, where other members of the DUNA group, Lenka Wallon (Berlínskej model) and František Svatoš (Studio Jafr), are now based. Kyllar's before last year's pun for the tone-setter Balenciaga launched him from lockdown to collaboration with associated proponents of an Eastern European, street-close aesthetics of ugliness, Acne Studios, and the Mel Ottenberg-led Interview magazine. Sky Fereirra with a hickey in Celine or - look! - gallerist Sadie Coles, mother of the child of Jürgen Teller's father of style, take the snapshot tradition of flowers in a bin and raw lightning further into desaturated, clinical naturalism on the one hand and dreamy organicism on the other, the shape-fluidity and "dazed" disorientation of beauty and the murky, no doubt toxic river washing over Yeezy Crocs shoes. As with other works by his visual contemporaries, the absurdity and futility of a civilization in decay indulging its indulgence, a literal visualization of our cultivation of luxury in a landfill, permeates Kyllar's photographs. But it remains within the norm, at least from Corrine Day, unless there are children involved, customers don't seem to be upset.

Michal Nanoru