Sequence Painting

Floating garden Considerable pressure is nowadays placed on an artist in respect of their presentation and self-presentation. Presenting art in real time does not suffice and on-line portfolios, publications and websites documenting an artist’s work have become a common, and even a necessary practice. This can, however, often be problematic, as in Břetislav Malý’s painting, which should really be seen in person on site. When Břetislav told me that he was preparing a catalogue, I could not imagine how the catalogue could be designed so that the artwork presented in it resonated when reproduced on paper. The photographer Vladimír Novotný (Kiva) and the graphic designer Jakub Konvica accepted this in-triguing challenge and approached it with exactness and bravery akin to one of Malý’s experiments with painting. This is why I cannot perceive this work solely as a catalogue, but rather as the artist’s further probing into the coherence of content and colour, which has been his long-term interest. This time he has been researching the link between theoretical interpretation and the technical possibilities of print and photography. The information in the imprint and artist’s personal data, “site-specific” and “time specific” information, consistently contextualise the whole. The perception of any art is fundamentally affected by the viewer’s intellectual, mental and physi-cal state at the moment. On some occasions being fresh helps, on others one can be tired. The viewer’s background knowledge can either deepen the perception, or dull it. If I were to recall fundamental texts written by abstract painters which influenced my writing, they are: Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the spiritual in art, Piet Mondrian’s Le Néo-plasticisme dedicated to “fu-ture men” and James Elkin’s Pictures & Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings. The last time I referenced Elkin’s text in relation to Břetislav Malý’s work was in the commentary to the show The dissipation of space as a consequence of the synthesis of colour in The Youth Gallery in 2015. This time it is because I realised that conceptual art can be sufficiently rendered in the printed medium. When I first saw Július Koller’s Sea, it was in a small black-and-white reprint, yet it was, for me, a cathartic experience with this work of art. I felt a similar emotion in Blansko Town Gallery in Břetislav Malý’s show About red (2016). That time reproduced copies were not enough – it was essential to see the originals, and to see them in that particular spatial constellation. I initially understood Břetislav Malý as a classic abstract painter who depicts the core of the charm of the picturesque landscape of his home in Polešovice. I detected both lines of abstraction – geo-metrical and lyrical, and now I can also see the conceptual line. Malý places layers of paint in sur-faces and in horizontal and vertical lines. He de-structs the backgrounds, which are dynamic; they warp and resist, become pliant or seem to be undecided, weighing both options. Photography can-not capture this process, thanks to which the art pieces acquire conceptual, almost ephemeral di-mensions and prove to be not at all as classical as they might have seemed at first sight. Such in-tensive liberation from the frame and claiming the space first occurred in his art in 2016. The trilogy of shows starting with About red in time (2016), via Mere space of the colour green (2016) and to the last one so far Ludwig let out the kite (2017), presents a relaxed approach to the notion of a painting and accentuates the true nature of painting, while the titles of the artwork humorously comment on the author’s intellectual background (see references to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work). The most compelling example of such a shift is the final series of circular frameless canvases titled Floating Garden (2017). The author himself is probably still unsure of their final number, it being a continuous creation. The series has a ‘zen-like’ potential: in a daily revisitation the artist adds single layers of paint onto identical 58 cm circular canvases; it takes him about a day to create each painting. The mass of the paint models the absent frame and turns the edges upwards into the shapes of water lilies or dining plates. This work’s potential lies in the lightness with which it is being created but also in the variability of its installation. Individual circles have been installed either layered one on another, or individually spread out on the ground; I could imagine how their meaning would change if they were kinetic or rolled up like pancakes. The title of the series Floating garden obviously directs the viewer towards botany, leading to an interpretation of the artwork as waterlilies. This is how Břetislav Malý returns to depicting nature and landscape, both of which are the most stable and the most forward-looking indications that I have seen in his artwork since my first acquaintance with it. Nature is, however, not portrayed directly in his paintings, it emerges from them serendipitously. There is only one thing that can be said for certain: if we sometimes see a tapestry, object, statue or installation, it is always only a painting. Zuzana Janečková