Group show of smaller works from 2011-2012, recently exhibited in Pragovka with 5 other artists
Astronauts, Indians and
Monkeys
I began working with
astronauts as a motif in 2011. In some respects they represented my
isolation and feelings of discovery as an immigrant to the Czech
Republic. Living in a foreign country is something like a science
fiction story. Foreigners drop in like strangers from another world,
here I am like a man from Mars. Later I learned about Kristof
Kintera’s use of the spacesuit (skafandr) as a metaphor of the
fragile ego and the desire to communicate in an atomized society, in
line with Wilhelm Reich’s concept of character armoring. The
astronauts work that way for me too. Not speaking the language well,
painting becomes a poetic mode of communication for me. I float in a
fog apart from other people. But then again so do a lot of other
people.
The character of the
astronaut invited his friends the American Indian and the skeleton
Death to join him. The rush to technological superiority is built on
a death culture. These twin spirits of the American experience, the
astronaut (technological man) and the Native American, are locked in
a struggle, an attraction/repulsion based on love and hate. This is a
symbolic rendering of the first contact between Europe and the
Americas, one of the pivotal experiences of the last
millennium. In a sense the discovery of the New World ushered in
modernity, and the eventual genocide of the American peoples, the
Trail of Tears, set the fate of the nation in its constant struggle
over race, class and violence. But these are not only American
problems …
In 2012 monkeys entered
the work, as symbols of man in his ignorance and uncertainty in a
world he has made apart from nature. Death lurks behind most of these
paintings, they are memento mori, meditations on death. And yet all
paintings are traces left behind, counting down the time when the
artist dies and his/her work has the potential to gain in value, in a
sane and stable society. Like monkeys we gaze at a candle flame in
the dark, uncertain of our future, these days more than ever it
seems. In our search for technological supremacy, we seek to steal
fire from the gods, and like Prometheus, we will be punished for our
hubris. But it is this reaching for more, the search for liberation,
which makes us human. The mystery of man is what I seek in my work.
