What I regard as important I paint, especially the important things that fascinate me.
motto
A
change
of
Horizon – land on the horizon ( Oblivion )
I lean down to the ground, in the little room of a young woman, a honey-coloured
carpet, the fragrance of perfumes, phallic trinkets, a sugary atmosphere of
femininity cocooned, I loll to the ground and lay into the carpet of hot honey,
my eyes drift lower and lower, something like a thin feather standing up to
dense air in the windlessness. I take in the space from the lowest possible
perspective, thoughts landing from their free-falls around me alongside swirling
dust, my almost imperceptible breath sends many beyond the boundaries of return,
and I forget them without a word of parting. And I forget my physical existence,
and am in the process of becoming no more than a moving frame of the ambient
world of this one room, in which all that lies without is represented either
directly or by mutated delegates. Through the flow of moments I find myself on a
path that I sense, rather than see, beneath my feet, connecting the two horizons,
the movement of my eyelids deciding which side I’ll set out on. The
intersecting perspective flings back like the tongue of a chameleon, it has
almost reached me when I realize that there is something stuck to it, something
incomprehensible but real, something so tender as to make me nauseous and
simultaneously titillated – on the honey coloured carpet, like minute
structural anomalies, wee wads of honey hair lie altogether lackadaisically,
artfully moved by depilator and forgotten.
(stagnant waters?)
It can be said without risk that the surfaces of the combined vessels of
„Euro-American art“ have aligned, some time ago in fact, but it is evident
that an elite exists in the sense of individual personalities, that the centres
are instead power-financial (though probably all the more stimulating thereby),
that manifestations of fine art, through their breadth of expression, have taken
on a kind of universality with slight regional deviations (the vector of art
amalgamates cultures that have been hitherto unthinkably disparate), that the
act of creation began in real time, meaning that he who looks elsewhere to take
on examples loses initiative and is irrevocably doomed to becoming one of „the
others“. It is clear it’s every man for himself today, it is unnecessary to
adapt to anything. Plurality is not the merit of any centre; it is merely a
historical consequence, to which all participants have contributed through their
work.
The
orchestra’s harmonizing is at its end. A moment of silence, applause, the
conductor arrives. A twelve-piece fugue resounds on the theme of „Gaudeamus
Igitur“. In this rendering, thanks to an astute arrangement, the fugue has a
resemblance to Depeche Mode‘s Black
Celebration.
An amazing transformation, from ditty to dignified hymn, from climactic form to ditty.
Before the final orchestral ripieno, backed up, moreover, by guest organ,
electric guitar and African rhythms, the pieces of the orchestra line up in an
ordered chromatic spacing and defile the auditory meatus of the awestruck
listeners, while stuccoed maskarony bombard the heads leaning out of their box
seats, blood drips from the ears, nose, ulcers burst,
and the mighty GÁUDEÁMÚS ÍGITÚR
triumphs
in a plume of dust.
Process
Oil
painting not only dictates the succession of time and horizon, if we proceed by
layers, but likewise the long-term nature of the work does not allow every
ephemeral visual perception or idea to be captured. Instead the work must bridge
the gaps, generalize, embrace what the author regards as important, what he
devotes himself to, what he regards as his own specific take on reality.
Likewise, a moment of correction in an instant when the thought gains a visual
form, impacts the thought itself in return, and develops it further (or aborts
it). In the process of creating a painting, parallel solutions may arise; the
work contains decision within, with the variations eliminated.
Skewed
hip
Old crows, bearers of joy, cawing woe,
the beak sinks into the soft tissue and tugs jerkily.
Come, open up your intriguing lap
to the
creaking of the joints,
let your prosthesis bite that watery leg
-do
you feel that? it’s
the gall bladder again – that conniving little devil
tying
a wreath
Everything slushy and mild bliss, becomes substance.
Nth
fragment of the mth
fragment, when both m
and n
approach the infinite, the converge in a sheer space
(
if we shift our attention from the whole to the detail, the external coherence–
the story component, anchorage in a definite space, etc. - begins to disappear,
and we arrive at the abstract reality, which, on the one hand assumes features
of the universal, and on the other involves capturing a unique moment of a
unique situation )
Epilogue
-
epitaph
In
the bedroom of oblivion, in the climax of ecstasy, words are welling up and
returning from whence they came, without leaving a single trace of themselves.
The honey coloured carpet imbibes the sweat of delight, and its dark points of
impact are drawn into an unbroken surface. The ravens stare with surprise and
the old meat trembles in the pulse of delight. What was but a short while ago
outlandish, has been spent.
Karel Balcar
A
Well Played Opening
Karel
B A L C A R, a recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, is without
argument an artist of savourous individuality who, even at this early stage, can
be considered an accomplished figure. In this context it is impossible to ignore
the fact that his work bears a distinct seal of inimitability, which has been
the case virtually throughout the entire course of his studies. A selection-oriented
approach to the concept of portrayal painting, the type of specialised
orientation on figures, along with characteristic content, distinguishes Karel
Balcar’s work from the majority of mainstream production in the Czech Republic
- a conviction which has been confirmed by all of the exhibits he has taken part
in. Nonetheless, when one accounts for what the recent and contemporary events
of the richly stratified pluralist scene of modern art in the world, it can be
said with a clean conscience that an entirely evident and cogent context is at
work here. In his voluminous publication „Art Today“ Edward Lucie-Smith
writes in one of several chapters dedicated to portrayal painting: „One of the
most surprising changes brought by the development of art in the last thirty
years is that many artists have once again begun to scrutinize the pre-modernist
past“. Elsewhere he writes: „Contemporary artists have, in fact, made an
interesting discovery: they have found that as a result of the gulf between 20th
century art and art of the distant past, there is now something held in common
with all the works of the masters of old - diversity – such as was once
attributed only to art that was not of western origin.“ Some – mostly
younger – artists are fascinated by this absurd situation. So as to avoid the
danger of convention in overly cheap modern academism that weeds its way into
everything in an intensely base form, they rather make a radical return to
the past. They have begun to relate to their own European tradition as if to
something remote and almost foreign, and treat it likewise without scruple. As
both a direct and indirect consequence of manifold scepticism towards
perspectives on contemporary civilization, amongst a great many of today’s
artists it is possible to find the key to the tendency of regressions to form
portrayal, the legitimate components of which are also a path leading to the
exploration of pictorial memory. The work of Karl Balcar can be categorized (even
period-wise) among these contemporary endeavours, which have actually appeared
throughout the entire course of the second half of the century, and which
draws on the traditions of classicism, mannerism and primarily baroque
illusionism. Amongst the last named are, for example, in France - Garouste, Sändorfi,
Czernus, in Norway - Nerdrum, in Spain - Lopez-Garcia, Bravo, in South America -
Botero, Cárdenas, Arang, Camarra and in England perhaps Lonard.
Behind
the protective layer of seeming perfection however, the work of Karl Balcar is a
seismograph of his feelings. This has been the case since the very outset of his
first, surprisingly mature cycle on the sanguinary theme „Lukrecie“, (just
as with his own portrait it is possible to find elements of Reni classicism),
through the Carravagio twilight principle of the harmonized medical scene „miscarriage“,
expressively, through to the picturesqueness maximized by the Zurbaran
tenebrism of the three „self-portraits“, the direct realism of the erotic
painting „post koitum“ and two gnarly scenes from the dissecting room,
all the way to a return to his own running thematic sphere of femme fatales,
with their alluring creases of somewhat oldfangled lingerie, from the laces of
which Beelzebub could easily peep out.
Women as the subjects of manipulation also appear again on three
paintings of his thesis. One is displayed as precious goods in a horizontal
position on a table. Another is preparing to mount a table with a chair, and
another actually hangs suspended in a space. In light of the horizontal of
the main motif, the torsos of male nudes on two other photo-canvasses have the
effect of absurd caryatids. The coldness of the black-and-white photography
magnifies the sheen of the selection of paintings, elaborated lustrously with a
delicate illusive paint. Between these players is however a match that is yet to
have been played out. The use of chess terminology in title of the theme, which
specifically refers to the type of opening game in which black sacrifices a pawn
so as to overtake his opponent in the development of pieces and quickly launch
an offensive, has of course an alternative sense here. It points to a possible
analogy between certain pictorial configurations and movement on the chessboard.
The seemingly incoherent and peculiar motif of the mechanical prosthesis may
stress the risk of taking action in a decisive bout.
Figurative painting is, as it has been since the very beginning, a matter
of cardinal destiny for Karl Balcar. He deals with it in a conscious and
programmed manner. At first sight, the technical sovereignty with which the form
of portrayal is handled here is arresting, however its concurrent secretiveness
may be dissuading. In any case, its impact is – in spite of the many shifts in
opinion even in our constricted post-modern scene – exceptional all the same.
What does this nonconformity reside in? A paradox, as if implicit within the
process of origination itself, and of course also in the final form of his
paintings. It seems nearly implausible that Karel Balcar himself belonged to a
rare sort of talents in college, amongst whom the obstinate striving for
personal release has stood far to the forefront ahead of the problems of
technique itself. Such release then became the driving force in overcoming
difficulty, which has simply capitulated to this will. Contentual and formal
intransigence, led provocatively across temporal dimensions, may be the very
fruit of such travail.
Today Karel Balcar controls the right resources of painting to such a
degree that he is capable of freely working with them in the name of his own
imagination. He is able to elicit shreds of grim tales in his pictures, in which
it seems like spirits of renewed tendencies of romanticism circumambulate,
multiplied by accents of stylised aggression and salacious shadiness. At the
same time he manages to eschew tawdry effects of fantasy or any feigning of the
cryptic, which is particularly noteworthy – he need not deviate towards even a
hint of banally empty symbolist stylisation. The torsos of figures, often
isolated in an ambiguous environment, themselves become kinds of lone
phantoms of reality, chess figures in an unfinished match. It is likely for that
very reason that we feel a distinct detachment, delineating this work as
postmodernist rule. The precise, hermetic forms of real form create a barrier
between the stage and the auditorium. The spectator is not allowed to join in.
It is as if a legacy of classicism were at work here, of that tributary of
European thought that has long been furthest from modern art in its objective.
If we look from that obligatory detachment at the respectable work
k
of Karl Balcar, we may understand that he offers a peculiar operatic
presentation, which we may either boo or frantically applaud.