Interview before the upcoming exhibition "Far and Within Reach".
His source of inspiration was Kenya. My thematic scope over that nearly forty-year period is much broader, but his influence on my work was undoubtedly significant. I call it "being indebted to his guidance." If your question is focused only on paintings inspired by distant places in our world, for me, it started with Malta, and the evolution was complex, with a direct connection to work-related and study-related journeys.
Of course, I know that. I have a rough estimate of how your answers will sound. I'm asking these questions primarily for future readers.
That's a mutual advantage, and I'm grateful for meaningful questions. The worst is when journalists, some journalists, ask you questions like: when most, which biggest, where do you most... I first saw two of Hes' paintings sometime in the mid-seventies at the apartment of our mutual acquaintance. It was like an enlarged microcosm, "Moth" and "Aquarium." At that time, I had no idea that we would someday meet in roles of teacher and student. We personally met for the first time in October 1978, a few days after I started at the faculty. He invited me to his studio. I thought I was going there to create something, to learn something, so I diligently brought along my plein air kit with my painter's tools of the time, and a few of my older works as well – ones that I considered to be in the realm of dark underground, where I played with forbidden fruit. I was used to a dual role, creating something different at home for myself and something else for school, for example, and I sensed in him a kindred and understanding conspiratorial spirit.
And were you mistaken?
Not at all. In the studio in Luně na Borech, he told me about his trips to visit his father, who held the position of ambassador in Kenya. Then we discussed art, especially the 1960s. My head was preoccupied with Boudník, Janošek, Istler, Medek, Koblasa, and it seemed to me that he exactly understood what was happening in my head. We both spoke eagerly, interrupting each other's speech as if we needed to quickly convey everything each of us had experienced up to that moment. We also delved into painting techniques; for me, it was a beneficial "seminar." One of his large canvases left a particularly deep impression on me. The view of the Nairobi airport, seen perhaps through the window of an airplane taxiing on the runway. Dense enamel pastes, transparent glazes, and structured areas evoked in me the paintings of my painting guru, Mikuláš Medek. The painting "Masai," which you're asking about, is dated 1979. I managed to acquire it in Prague five years ago when the property of the Hotel Prague was being auctioned before its planned demolition. A very similar painting, something like its twin, is in the possession of the Karlovy Vary Art Gallery. I have several of them, and one was even dedicated to Milan directly in 1986. In August 1981, my friend and I traveled to Austria, which was a significant experience during the normalization period. I saw collections of 20th-century world art for the first time; there was no such exhibition to be seen here, and traveling for art outside the Eastern Bloc was incredibly difficult. I painted Vienna and big cities, initially as urban landscapes, but over time, I distanced myself from specific cities and transitioned to more general themes of civilization. I began to view the city through an existential lens, as a pulsating giant agglomeration. I started hinting at these aspects in my diploma work, a series of five paintings on the theme of the changing city. Sometimes more overtly, sometimes more subtly, this aspect has accompanied my work to this day. In the same year, the painting "Road to Manětín" was created. I painted it outdoors on a pre-prepared ground, during a school plein air event. The subject is rooted in reality - a landscape marked by human settlement, roads, a gas station. At the opening of the exhibition, the painting caught the attention of a group of foreign doctors from Africa and the Middle East. When asked why they were interested in this particular painting, they replied that it reminded them of a settlement in the bush. Several years later, during my journey in the African savannah, I remembered this amusing story, and I realized that the old red gas station on the edge of Manětín could indeed remind people from a different cultural environment of a simple refreshment station with Coca-Cola somewhere on the edge of the bush. I encountered several of these myself. During the period from 1986 to 1988, I painted a series of paintings inspired by southern Europe, from Split, from the islands of Hvar and Brač. Although I considered this collection to be ordinary landscape painting and did not think it marked the beginning of anything new in my work, I had a very good feeling about the exhibition held at Dílo on Náměstí republiky. Before the exhibition, I asked poet Josef Hrubý for an introduction to the catalog. During his visit to my studio, not only did he promise to write the introduction, but he even offered to personally open the exhibition.
But he didn't open it because he went to a spa, and I ended up delivering his written opening speech at the "Red Heart" vernissage...
Yes, and the cultural part was taken care of by the theater ensemble he was a part of. He also visited me before the exhibition in my former studio on Koterovská Street and later wrote a poem called "City of Hope," inspired by that meeting. To this day, I praise him for it; everything from that evening was there: the colors smelling of turpentine, the tram on Koterovská with an evening cigarette, beautiful girls with eyes like Muti's, dinner at Jadran... That was May 1989, and at that time, I had no inkling of the significant turning point that would soon occur in my painting. Chance and my acquaintance with the travel agency CKM, for those who remember that abbreviation, played a role. In the summer of 1989, I traveled to the Maltese archipelago - Malta, Gozo, and Comino. Although Malta is a strongly Catholic country, it paradoxically provided me with my first personal encounter with the Orient. My somewhat grayish and monotonous palette gained brighter tones thanks to the sun, the cleanliness of the environment, and the mentality of the people. Essentially, the colors imposed themselves on my palette, and my paintings acquired a brighter and more colorful palette. Even upon arrival, when I left the airport hall and saw the world in true colors, I realized how we, here in the north beyond the Alps, see everything through a gray filter - neutral density, photographers and cameramen will know what I mean. The sky wasn't just azure; it was dense, with a touch of ultramarine, forming a sharp contrast with the coastal limestone architecture. Forests of television antennas for terrestrial analog signal reception on flat roofs resembled a scene from science fiction, as if the roofs of Mediterranean villas were experiencing an invasion of giant mosquitoes. I also remember how, during a bus trip across the island, I saw an architecturally interesting estate in Andalusian style, with mature date palms in an otherwise mostly dry reddish-brown landscape. I was captivated by that motif. Until evening, I didn't speak a word. The next day, I set out to find that motif, and because I remembered that there was no bus stop nearby, I set out on foot, probably out of impatience. The idea of that motif was magnetic to me, and I had a masochistic idea that if I walked in that scorching heat and physically exhausted myself, I would like the motif more. Or perhaps, the more destroyed I became, the more I deserved that motif. After all, art must come with sacrifices. And so it happened. I arrived at the destination, exhausted and dehydrated, and in addition, I experienced a state close to a heart attack because I had just run out of film in my camera.
You surely scanned that motif thoroughly with your eyes.
The word "scanned" doesn't fit until the end of the 1980s. We didn't know scanners yet, and when it came to digital technology, we might have had only wristwatches. I stood there for a long time to memorize the motif as best as possible, and a no less exhausting journey back to the hotel awaited me.
We still hadn't crossed the boundaries of the old continent. I believe your first country in the Orient that you traveled to was the Kingdom of Morocco. I brought you to Prague to quickly arrange the replacement of your expired passport and to the Moroccan embassy in Dejvice for a visa.
Yes. I watched documentary films, read travelogues, and was very interested in not only Malta but also the countries of North Africa and the Near and Middle East. After watching an older German documentary, I was captivated by the atmosphere of Djemaa el Fna square in Marrakech. Although it's nearly deserted during the day, it becomes completely filled with people and exudes an atmosphere like something out of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights. I sighed, thinking that I would like to experience this someday, but I had no hope at all. Since then, I don't underestimate coincidences, as within a year, I was standing on that square after dark, sensing the incredibly intoxicating explosion of scents, flavors, and sounds. In 1994, I took advantage of an opportunity to participate in a work trip to Morocco with a Czech Television crew and a group of journalists. This first work trip in the Orient completely changed my future work life, and in the following years, I went on numerous work and study trips, sometimes three or four times a year, mainly to the countries of the Maghreb but also the Near and Middle East. "Welcome" or "Ahlan wa sahlan" were usually the first words I heard upon arrival. Over time, it seemed to me that those phrases sounded somewhat worn and inappropriate in my ears. The feelings that tourists experience when they arrive in a holiday mood and are full of expectations became unfamiliar to me. I often returned to familiar environments. We were sent to Tunisia with a colleague photographer for our first work trips when the country was far from being a tourist destination. We stayed in small colonial-style hotels in cities, not in tourist zones, but in an environment not far from the everyday life of local people. I returned there often, having traveled the country several times from Bizerte to the Sahara, from Mides to Sfax. I watched with apprehension the rapid development as hotel complexes grew at an unbelievable pace. The world has changed rapidly due to fatal errors and continues to change slowly and constantly due to ongoing globalization. Our planned trips to Baghdad or Damascus did not materialize for understandable reasons. Our reasons are indeed understandable, but the causes are beyond my understanding. The world seems to have gone mad. One might almost say we've gone mad with it. We're pushing the boundaries of truth and have created a post-factual era. We should rightfully be proud of it. The subjects from deserts and oases that I carry within me are far from exhausted, but that environment, at least in the form I knew it, has become part of my nostalgic memories after 2001.
Have I understood correctly that you stopped painting the environment where you haven't been for a while, regardless of the reasons, and started painting subjects from a culturally different environment that is current for you, and you don't want to return?
I wanted to express that I still have many subjects within me that I could put on canvas, and probably that will happen. But they will carry the atmosphere of the place at the time I was there, maybe even a touch of nostalgia. I still have many creative debts; in my storage, I have around twenty unfinished paintings, some from North and West Africa, others from Southeast Asia, and a head full of new ideas. These paintings are inspired by specific environments, and I often name them after specific places. However, they are not documentaries. They carry, or I would like them to carry, the atmosphere of the place, a sort of genius loci, but also the necessary touch of mystery. In simple terms, not revealing everything. This is related to my approach, which I've arrived at and have followed for many years - not revealing everything all at once, extending the pleasure of discovery, leaving a bit of mystery for later, not rushing quickly and directly to the destination, deaf and blind. And it's not always necessary or appropriate to reach the destination, because the journey itself can be, under certain circumstances, the goal. This is also related to the preference for quality over quantity. I argue that the same applies to art; there's no need to churn out paintings but to explore, experiment, and create. Experience the joy of creation, even though it's mostly hard work, and also leave something unsaid - a hint that sparks the imagination. However, it's difficult to know when it's time to stop. I'm constantly struggling with that; I've overwritten many things because I let myself get carried away.
You undertook a total of three trips to Vietnam, mostly one month long each. How should I interpret the shift from arid deserts to the tropics?
The main reason was the changing political climate in general, but mainly in the countries that were supposed to be our promised travel destinations, like Iraq, Palestine, or Syria. And once again, chance played a role. I received an offer to join a group of journalists and reporters, "radio people," on a study trip, this time to Vietnam. The trip was sponsored by Vietnam Airlines, and the Czech side was endorsed by the then Minister of Culture, Cyril Svoboda. During this first trip, we literally and meticulously followed a demanding schedule, so we experienced a marathon. The entire journey blended for me into one shapeless entity, a combination of overwhelming impressions, maximum knowledge, and minimal sleep. I realized that it would be much more meaningful not to set excessive goals ahead but to perhaps stay an extra day in places that were worth it, adjust the overall plan as we go, and even improvise. For example, in the area of central Vietnam, because I have a special fondness for the ancient Khmer culture, I suggested that we could search for the vanished Cham city of Cha Ban.
Ah, something like searching for Shangri-La, the search for a lost paradise?
Yes, but with the difference that James Hilton fabricated Shangri-La, whereas Cha Ban (Cha Ban), as the center of the ancient Champa kingdom, truly existed in the past. We borrowed two motorcycles and, in a group of four, rode towards the designated destination through villages, wild landscapes with lush vegetation, mountain jungles. We got lost a few times, got soaked to the bone, sometimes got stuck in mud. Every local was willing to help us, because of course, he "safely" knew where to find Cha Ban. And yet, it was nowhere to be found. However, during that process, we experienced an immense amount of adventurous exploration, discovered fascinating places, and found, not the major, well-known Cham monuments like My Son or Phan Rang, but instead, free-standing structures, seemingly forgotten, additional Khmer towers or their ruins, and other charismatic spots that you won't find in any guidebook. The journey was the goal. Each of us found our own Cha Ban, a blissful state of the soul. I mentioned the Cham site My Son. It's an impressive monument; from the perspective of a Central European, I would call it a romantic jewel in the surrounding jungle. Khmer brick towers occasionally shrouded in lush vegetation. I visited it three times, on each journey through Vietnam. It has the greatest charisma in the winter months when it's not scorched by the sharp sun but, on the contrary, covered in a white mist of tropical humidity. Even in the rain, it has an immense charm, colorful depth, and a touch of mystery. In the Middle Ages, it was a significant center of education for the entire region and, along with Cambodia's Angkor and Thailand's Ayutthaya, marked a significant milestone in the Khmer-Hindu culture.
Do you have a new travel destination on the horizon?
No. As I indicated earlier, I have too many skeletons in the closet, as I mostly couldn't finish working on a topic from one journey before another journey was on the horizon. For example, we were returning from Jordan, and already at the airport, there was talk of flying to Egypt in two months. In the past, I used to travel more than paint, but now I'm trying to make it work the other way around.
I often drove you to the airport or from the airport back home. You used to have large and especially heavy and numerous bags, especially on return trips.
And with that came many problems at the airports during those return transfers. In my life, I've been caught in a trap at least three times from which there is no escape. The first is painting; I was caught in 1972, and Míra Havlic is to blame for that. The second is traveling, and Marrakech is to blame for that. And the third trap is collecting, and I can only blame myself for that. I got caught at the moment when I started bringing back my first collectibles from distant lands, and from that moment, I became a slave to my passion.
We can't possibly cover all the interesting places you've visited today, so I'll ask in conclusion, what will we see at the exhibition?
This exhibition is my new authorial project. Its foundation consists of a collection of oil paintings inspired by distant places with different climates, cultures, and histories. It was created from the 1980s to the present, and the exhibition will be accompanied by original sculptures of African tribal art and authentic art objects and curiosities imported from Africa, Asia, and southern Europe. In other words, a collection of my paintings and a part of ethnographic collections, as well as several historical artifacts originating from my native village Nebřeziny in northern Plzeň.
Interview and recording made on March 3, 2019 by Mgr. Václav Voříšek
Selected from introductory texts in catalogs: Doc. Milan Hes, CSc., university educator, Vladimír Procházka, art journalist
The author's painting work has gone through four thematic circles: 1) City and Civilization - the city is seen through an existential lens, as a pulsating gigantic agglomeration (City's Lungs, Twilight Over the City). The use of nighttime illumination effects, the image surface marked by the radiance of neon lights, the movements of people, spotlights, and the lines of glowing car taillights (City in the Red Neon Lights, Return from the Weekend, Final Stop). The painting alternates between fine and high texture, pastes and glazes. To achieve a more expressive effect, the artist chooses grids, fragments of writing and symbols, avoiding cheap descriptiveness. His paintings convey urgency in their message, yet simultaneously retain a dose of poetry, for beauty can also be suffused with a certain venom to convey a warning. 2) Figurative work, primarily female nude (Room's Window, Sleep, Tropical Night). 3) Variations on well-known works by famous artists - the artist quotes, interprets, reprocesses, and spatially shifts the works elsewhere, showing possible variants, subjecting them to analysis, as if erasing the layer of contemporary dust (Great Gioconda, Variations on Velázquez, Breakfast on the Grass). 4) Subjects inspired by distant places with different climates, cultures, and histories, the world of the Orient. He undertook numerous work trips to the Near and Middle East, Africa, and Asia (Marrakech, Fez, Gate to the Medina). In a sense, his images of the metropolis return to the theme of civilization (Taxi - Hong Kong, Avenue HB, Transfer to an Unknown Megapolis).
Collage, assemblage, object... The times were not favorable...
(Introduction to the exhibition catalog: Object, Picture, Imprint - Jiří Trnka Gallery, 2018)
I was delighted when, after many years, I met my former schoolmate Petr Johanus in the summer of 2008 at the Carpe Diem music club in Vinohrady. A significant part of the evening was unexpectedly spent at the bar, just the two of us, engaged in a lively discussion about art. With Petr, it couldn't have been any different; he was simply like that - spontaneous, loud, an enthusiastic storyteller, but above all, a person with broad cultural insight and rich life experiences. He posed what seemed to be a trivial question: "What are you painting?" I considered it a mere formality and assumed that my brief, evasive answer would suffice: "I don't even know, I'm in a bit of a creative crisis." He immediately responded knowingly: "That's not a bad state at all. When you realize this crisis, it means you must have been creative for a long time before that." I was especially pleased with another meeting in the late afternoon of August 23, 2015. I remember the date exactly because it was the day my solo exhibition ended in Prague at the Nová síň gallery. At least half of the total number of exhibited paintings were already packed and ready for transport back when, suddenly, Petr appeared between the doors of the exhibition hall, shouting from a distance: "Berenika told me to hurry up and go take a look; it's ending today and it's fantastic. So here I am. Unfortunately, I couldn't make it earlier." Some paintings that were already packed were unpacked again. Perhaps the greatest joy I had was after the vernissage of Petr's (second in sequence) retrospective exhibition held in September 2015 at the South Bohemian Museum in České Budějovice. For the first time, I had the opportunity to see (concentrated in one place) his free-form work on a larger scale, admire, among other artifacts, the remarkable results of his work with found objects. I enjoyed identifying bizarre fragments that he implanted into others with surgical precision. He intentionally combined them to evoke associations, stir imagination, bring new functions, or create new meanings. In a way, I can imagine this creative stage; I also went through it in the 1970s. Upon making an interesting discovery, your heart races, your breath quickens, and associations with the principles of removal from context or role transformation awaken in your brain. The creator of objects works much like a poet and often becomes a visual poet himself. I don't even remember who between us first mentioned the idea of a joint exhibition between the two of us and Berenika, but what's certain is that it was a shared desire.
Petr Johanus has become part of the context of Czech sculpture as the author of objects and assemblages, an artist with a sense of gentle personal humor and artistic irony. The unmistakable style of his work, leading to a certain smoothness of expression, has several causes. It lies primarily in the craftsmanship honesty characteristic of a graduate of furniture design and precise restoration technologies, and also in his artificial orientation with a meticulous sense of perfection.
Berenika Ovčáčková is a respected personality in contemporary Czech graphic art. She respects generationally proven graphic methods, especially etching and serigraphy, but she is not averse to new media and also experiments, combining techniques and breaking established stereotypical disciplinary boundaries. Her already demanding graphic expression is further subjected to a very daring experiment in some kind of counterbalance, intertwining a graphic print with pop-art collage of decorative wallpaper. She cuts it with a daring gesture, and as a whole, it not only holds up, it works magnificently. At other times, she processes themes verified by graphics using painting techniques. In the present digital age, she continues to enrich her creative potential with further artistic experiences, working with a computer, seeking new graphic forms, using autotypic grid rastering, employing fragments of characters, a rich range of structures, and even deliberate digital pixelation. Her works take on a postmodern face. She shifts serious and critical content towards allegory, satire, and grotesque. The way she communicates is at least as important as the urgency of the message being conveyed.
All three of us exhibiting authors have had discussions in which we came to the agreement that during our creative beginnings, discovering Czech art of the 1960s was a great adventure for each of us. Sources of study were very scarce during the normalization period, and those few issues of the journal "Fine Arts" from the early 1960s that anyone owned were cherished and not let go of. In this regard, we might envy Berenika for being guided by her father, Eduard Ovčáček, who in the first half of the 1960s, as a sculptor, graphic artist, and collagist, belonged to the pioneers of informel and maintained connections with the protagonists of Prague Confrontations, especially with Vladimír Boudník. The support of her parents - artists - was undoubtedly as important for the young artist as further specialized studies at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts. For Petr, the "golden sixties" primarily meant the example set by his predecessors, the masters of assemblage: Libor Fára, Vladimír Preclík, Zbyněk Sekal, and Jan Švankmajer. My more serious beginnings date back to 1974. Under the guidance of my first teacher, I went through a phase of smooth tempera painting, but I soon subconsciously felt the absence of another dimension, which led me to combine techniques and experiment with various materials. Informed by the surrealist circle of the Prague art school, I created works at the crossroads of painting, drawing, collage, and assemblage, often through mutual combination. I let myself be entranced by informal techniques, layering varnishes, printing structural graphics, and I assumed a conspiratorial air because, during my rapid professional expansion, there wasn't an atmosphere of complete ideological tolerance in society. This led (not only in me) to a mild creative schizophrenia. One part of my work was publicly presented, and the other part, due to self-censorship, didn't appear in my faculty credits, I didn't show it to the eye of the art jury, thus not to the public either. Out of nostalgia, I've now taken some of these older pieces out of storage and included them in this exhibition collection, some of them are exhibited in Pilsen for the first time, some for the very first time.
Although all three of us exhibiting authors are completely independent artists, not united by a common theme, nor perhaps by the need to form a group, there is still a noticeable common aesthetic view and a shared perspective on the formal aspect of creation in this exhibition. It is characterized by the combination of artistic disciplines or at least the crossing of their boundaries. And as is naturally the case in art, different paths lead to a common opinion and understanding. Pavel Mutinský 2018