Petr Kvíčala / Research into the Ornament Continues
26.03.2025 - 26.07.2025
Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Ondřej Chrobák
Opening: 26th March, 7 pm
The exhibition sums up the last fifteen years of work of the Brno painter Petr Kvíčala. The artist returns to the post-industrial environment of the gallery where he presented a retrospective of the first two decades of his work in 2008. In the imaginary total of both exhibitions, we arrive at an impressive time span of more than thirty-five years, during which the mentioned "research" into the field of ornament has been taking place. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, Petr Kvíčala made a name for himself with an original synthesis of the language of geometry and postmodernism. This is how he approached the defence of ornament as both an issue of mathematical order and an aesthetic phenomenon of a fading reputation. Ornament was rehabilitated, and the red wavy line became Kvíčala's signature form.
Ornaments, along with the wavy line, most often in the shape of a crenellation or a zig-zag line, continue to permeate Kvíčala's paintings like a mycelium, sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit. This polarity is perhaps more distinct in the period covered by the current exhibition than in the previous stages of his work. On the one hand, there are paintings constructed by a fine ornamental network, as if "embroidered", from which geometrical bodies of delicate colours pop out; on the other, robust, almost rustic ornaments resulting from gestic strokes of a broad brush. In recent years, the dichotomy between subdued monochromy and festival colours has found a background in the artist's life, asymmetrically divided between the city and rural seclusion. The rediscovered closeness to nature brings back into Kvíčala's current situation reminiscences and updates of his artistic discoveries made more than three decades ago. Once again, woodworking comes into play, parallel to painting. Large wooden objects should be understood primarily as extensions of Kvíčala's painting into the third dimension, offering the viewer, among other things, an immersive experience of entering the "inside" of the painting.
Kvíčala continues to work in open cycles in which he explores, tests and exploits his artistic discoveries. The exhibition, tailor-made for the unique space of the Fait Gallery, is an opportunity for the audience and the artist himself to examine the results of this work. Petr Kvíčala has invited the artist Karíma Al-Mukhtarová to his exhibition as a special "guest". Intuitively, he feels a loose affinity with her work which he associates with a sensitivity close to the art of Eva Kmentová. If Kvíčala's construction principle of his paintings was named "manual geometry" in the early days, for Karíma Al-Mukhtarová, the manual approach is analogically vital - primarily the demanding work of embroidery, where the needle and cotton penetrate impenetrable materials such as glass or wooden beams. The hidden geometry principle, represented by the implied orthogonal structure that is inevitably present even in intimate handiwork such as obsessive embroidery, perhaps unsurprisingly meets the fundamental principle of Kvíčala's work, which is an interest in the order of nature and its disruption.
Ondřej Chrobák
Petr Kvíčala has created several artworks in the public space in Brno:
- a monumental painting on the glass frontage of the Passage Hotel (2019), Lidická Street 23,
- the frontage with figurative drawings on the new church of the Blessed Virgin Mary Restituta (2019), Nezvalova Street 13,
- the Zig Zag 3,2 sculpture (2014) next to the building of the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Husova Street 18,
- painting in the Festive Hall, a terrazzo floor and painting on the vaults in the Reduta Theatre (2005), Zelný trh 313.
Tomáš Absolon / RAFA MATA
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Fait Gallery, Ve Vaňkovce 2, Brno
Curator: Pavel Kubesa
Special opening day: October 8, 4 pm–9 pm
The Event of Painting
The RAFA MATA exhibition project is, after some time, the first solo show of Tomáš Absolon in the Czech Republic. The artist develops in it his internal motivation to go back to the issues of pure painting. He chooses as his means of expression the most elementary components of the paining arsenal, colour and shape, and at the same time reduces the possibilities of the exhibition and installation aesthetics to bare minimum. Such artistic strategy places in the centre of attention the format of a picture per se, and presents Absolon’s found forms of contemporary painting in condensed form.
Work with his own, continuously built corpus of inspiration has always been important for Tomáš Absolon. His extensive database of subjects, symbols and influences stemming from broad cultural consciousness framed by experience of the global world of web 2.0 enables Absolon in his visual reductions to go beyond the conservative approach to the picture towards “postmodern mythologies“: the picture is only linked with external phenomena existentially, i.e. ontologically, not in reflected form (i.e. semantically). The pictorial visuality is thus not iconically (not even “arbitrarily“) associated with inspirational contents: the reference function of the pictorial symbol is completely suppressed and the “theme aspect“ of the series is created by a defining aesthetic and formal environment in which Absolon explores the possibilities of the development of new picture motifs.
The aesthetic environment, i.e. the sum of aesthetic features and qualities, traditional symbols, myths and representations making up the backdrop of the RAFA MATA project, is a hybrid territory stretching between top-level sport and corporate ideology: Absolon’s topical pictures are rooted in specific internal aesthetics of top-level tennis and sophisticated visual systems of the tobacco industry. These two worlds seem miles apart but share visual attractiveness, as well as distinct pictorial representations and an equally powerful emotional charge of the overall image of these two “incredibly sexy lifestyles“. However, Absolon wipes off the borders between these two inspirational stimuli, only extracting from them their typical colour composition and essential shapes.
The RAFA MATA series marks a shift from the previous ones in which Abssolon embraced formal trends from other avenues of art such as graphic design and typography, and subordinated the individual pictures to a pre-defined summarizing concept. He now focuses on the painterly solution to a particular picture. In each painting he attempts, by means of a unique visual motif, to develop the purely painterly inner logic of a picture which only unfolds in the very event of painting. The colour scheme approached more through space mediated by both gradual and sharp colour transitions, and loosely rendered shape lines return to the play of Absolon’s pictures re-found objectivity of motifs; at the same time, they open the possibility of the theme of a painting error: the space of the error is also the space of the happening of painting which visualizes and unveils this inner logic.
Absolon’s latest pictures require an interest in detail. They make a picture present in time and physical space, they remove it from interpretation and reception strategies of the consumption of visual representations in the environment of digital platforms and place it in a physical relationship with the viewer. The event of painting thus becomes (in a more and more dematerializing manner of experiencing everyday life) a directly accessible event of experiencing painting; this gives rise to an inherent continuity between the inner self and the surrounding world, a continuity which is not mediated and which can’t be mediated, a continuity which is undergoing a major crisis in the current situation of a global pandemic.
