POSTCARDS FROM CACTI FALLS

There are moments in an artist’s trajectory when the production of images ceases to obey the seductive logic of visibility. In such moments, it returns to its original function, becoming a pure gesture directed inwards. Postcards from Cacti Falls emerges from precisely this state of suspension. Following years of intensive exhibition and project-based activity, Dušan Kochol began, in 2019, to cultivate a slow and quiet photographic practice, developed far from any intention of public presentation. The Polaroids that comprise this body of work – produced over a period of more than six years and accompanied by notebooks, annotations, and fragments of writing – took shape as a private archive of images and thoughts, accumulated with devotion and without addressing any specific recipient.

 

The title immediately introduces a geography that is both real and imaginary. The “postcards” do not imply a distant recipient; rather, they are messages addressed to the artist himself, greetings sent across the years to a future version of his own gaze. Cacti Falls evokes a place that seems to belong to a possible map – as is often the case with the names of natural landmarks – while simultaneously constructing a mental space: an imaginary oasis suspended between desert and subtropical vegetation, where the landscape is transformed into a new visual alphabet, at once intense and intimate, reflecting an inner condition. The journey unfolds not as a linear narrative or a purely geographical account, but rather as a constellation of intermittent apparitions. In its fragmentary nature, the project seems to gravitate towards the tradition of travel literature, in which the journey is not simply a movement through space but a means of acquiring knowledge. In this sense, Postcards from Cacti Falls can be read less as the documentation of a project conceived for public display than as an interior retrospective; or, in other words, as the belated revelation of a practice that developed in the shadows.