Thursday, September 5, 2013

Cries and Whispers - Two Czech Painters

One advantage of viewing international art through the prism of the Czech scene is the way that the smaller country acts as a microcosm which reflects the greater world around it.  As above so below. Although the art market is in crisis now like everything else, one thing the cost of living in Bohemia allows for is the time to produce art, so the scene is rich and growing quickly.  One way to categorize artists which is often overlooked is the degree of aggression and sensitivity in the work, a kind of polar opposition of the extrovert and the introvert.  Cries and whispers, ie. those who shout from the mountain, and those who speak softly. I'd like to focus on two of my favorite painters in the Czech Republic to illustrate this difference, Vladimír Skrepl (b. 1955) and Zbyněk Sedlecký (b. 1976).



With his wildly expressive mark-making and infantile, regressive figuration, Vladimir Skrepl is the premiere bad boy of Czech art today.  Although his work is suggestive of Baselitz to some degree, Skrepl pushes further into scenes of a humorous nihilistic confrontation, typified by his painting of a poodle stabbed with a knife, the word "FUCK" emblazoned across the surface of the canvas.  Such crass maneuvering can be difficult to carry off, but Skrepl manages to find a sensitive counter-balance, his grotesque figures also elicit our sympathy through their tragic gaze, the sad eyes pull the viewer in.  The paintings reveal a dark ironic humour which hides a tragic, yet honest conception of the world.  Skrepl's confrontational stance reached a climax in the 2007/2008 group exhibit XYXX, which featured Skrepl's large canvases besides wall-sized projections of pornographic video works by Ondřej Brody and Bruce LaBruce.  In the USA this kind of shock tactic would make waves, but over here its just part of the anarchic spirit.



Skrepl soon turned to working more with sculpture, glue-gunning together strange totems from toys, fabric, and other plastic pop culture detritus.  These creatures share the vivid intensity of his paintings, like wayward schizophrenic children spontaneously generating from a garbage mound, there's something unsettling about the sheer number of them.  His most recent show at Galerie Ferdinand Baumann featured plastic brooms suspended from the ceiling, their bristles sprouting strings of ascending strands of glistening pink beads.  His reflections on dust and matter coming alive reveals an alchemical process in which the lowest scum produces treasures beyond measure.  Skrepl revels in this dichotomy.



Zbyněk Sedlecký, just over twenty years younger than Skrepl, works with a much lower confrontational stance, but when studied the paintings reveal a similar intensity of spirit, though more optimistic.  The large-scale acrylic paintings are made up of thin washes applied with the use of stencils and built up in layers.  The quick gestural strokes belie the carefully planned execution, and yet they add to the feeling of an almost effortless calm that permeates the heavy atmospheres of his urban landscapes.   Sedlecký was 13 at the time of the revolution, yet interestingly his work focuses on the decaying brutalist architecture from the 70s and 80s, together with the monumental sculpture that decorated these public spaces, so well documented in the recent Vetřelci a Volavky project.  However, these works do not arise from some misguided Ostalgie, rather they reflect on the present day, a kind of life in the ruins of history.  They resemble photographic snapshots, and like photographs they act as memento morii, faded relics of the passage of time.   Sedlecký's toned-down palette seems to grow from the cloudy gray light in Central Europe that reduces bright tones to an ashen mist.  His paintings are like insistent whispers floating in the air, yet they capture something very specific about the world where they are created.  They capture the current state of being suspended in history between the loss of belief in ideology and the terrible calm before an unclear, yet certainly stormy future.



links:
Skrepl: http://www.ad-astra.cz/umelci/vladimir-skrepl
Sedlecký : http://www.zbyneksedlecky.com/

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