Jiří Valoch

I have had the opportunity to follow the work of Petr Kvíčala for over ten years and have to confess that I am fascinated by the terseness of his approach: he has always been able to find new issues and new solutions and at the same time remain anchored in the field with which he had once identified himself. This is, of course, not only due to his extraordinary gift, but also (maybe first and foremost) due to his extremely intensive work, "in thought" as well as during concrete visual projects. He knows how to exhaust an issue fully, at the same time he is able to assess intuitively and with great precision the dangerous point of rigid multiplication in what has once been achieved, even if this multiplication is indeed beautiful... And there is always another, new issue "ready" for him to focus his attention.

It is more than ten years now that he closed his first period, still marked by a relation to empirical reality, with the perception of nature as the artist's primary concern. Of these perceptions and experiences, the most important were those of a general, fundamental compositional value - such as the repetitive succession governing the fields which adopted a quality of their own, or the outline of a hill that could have become an element whose mirror-like or serial multiplication produced a wavy line, probably the most basic linear element in the entire history of human visual culture. Monochromes appeared among his early works, certainly as the absolute point of rendering his natural experiences.

In 1986 he loosened his ties to empirical reality , considerably transformed. He became aware of the only possible approach to the visual art work: total autonomy of pictorial composition. He tried to achieve this autonomy by means uncommon at that time, not only for Czech art. The serial repetition of elements logically led him to the ornament and Kvíčala's contribution to the visual art context of his time gained importance when he realized he was sure about the possibilities of ornament: namely that the ornament has the capacity to become the theme of a visual geometric art work, not less so than other elements employed by various artists until then. After the modernist "lesson", however, both artists and theorists were fearful of the ornament. Kvíčala was not much of an orthodox postmodemist following a certain aesthetic programme, he simply elaborated his individual experience and had to find his own way leading from the paraphrased details of nature towards the autonomy of pictorial composition. He found that the articulation of a geometric work can be entirely individual, subjective and lyrical, and that it is possible to materialize a particular geometric arrangement via the individual gesture of a painter or draughtsman. This "freehand geometry" became a constant feature in the artist's work, and all his diverse projects thus also tell us about the interrelation of the general and the individual, the geometric groundplan as a starting point and its unique materialization....

To Kvíčala, "freehand geometry" meant "freehand ornament". This was the great novelty in Kvíčala's achievement of which we should now be aware, when ornament is becoming all the more attractive for some artists on various levels. From the very start, the wavy line was the predominating element in his work, immediately bound with the individual experience of every human, as an archetype written into the genetic memory, linking us together with different cultures in space and time. Kvíčala did not relate to the context of modem art but to the context of human artistic activity. In this he came quite close to the postmodemist programme, at the same time he felt a strong affinity to some approaches of modem art, especially the work of those solitary figures who did not seek to develop a collective programme but were dedicated to finding a possibly general and fundamental quality.

Such quality can be seen in order, what gives a work of art the opportunity to be parallel to this order which we feel to be a quality of the universe. Kvíčala is one of these solitary figures himself, he is convinced that a painting can still provide a new and com-municative message. However, he created important works in the form of installations, some of them transitory (such as the work in the hallway of Plasy monastery where he produced ornaments by pouring red sand on the floor, responding to the given character of the architecture and the transcendental quality of the location). In his exhibition at the Behémót Gallery, he addressed the pure sensibility of the red pigment layered on the floor, and explored the relationship between the colour on the picture/painting and colour as such.

During the period 1986-1996, he discovered ornament and its individual articulation as his innermost theme, and went on examining the two-dimensional characteristics of various types of composition, in both subtle and rather robust ways. One pole of his work consisted in the isolation of one sequence of ornament as an independent geometric element and the confrontation of several such elements within the context of the painting or the origination of ornament from an increasing series of elements. On the opposite pole there are two-dimensional structures of a multiplied element, sometimes with the alternation of two contrasting colours, most frequently red and black. The aesthetic quality of the more robust, brusque pieces was often enhanced by drafting the outlines. The artist was of course aware that his work may provoke associations with folk culture phenomena. He was, however, not concerned with the morphology, but with their general social quality. This is probably why he always emphasized festivity (as opposed to the everyday) as an important feature of his work. A break in the everyday, utilitarian, profane ...a unique experience, beyond the ordinary ...And if something has to be extra-ordinary, then all efforts, all time and all energy must be devoted to it.

From the utilitarian point of view, a great deal of art is pure foolishness, but it is this seemingly foolish activity which can become a source of values that cannot otherwise be achieved. Kvíčala was aware of this when he abandoned one plane of the canvas surface and began to fill the surfaces of his paintings with many layers of ornamental structures. The most radical ones were the white and red monochromes. In these, owing to the many layers of paint defined by a different quality and direction of the brush - stroke, new structural features were employed as an aesthetic and communicative quality: traces of white grounding, different degrees of intensity of the same colour originated by multiple layers in the respective areas. The result was a monochrome, highly differentiated, diverse in every spot and bringing more or less an obvious message about the inner order of the work. Elsewhere, the artist started with
a series of layers of primary colours and covered them later with monochrome layers of white or red. The predominant colour scale of the paintings - vastly differentiated due to the many structures of the geometric ornaments - grew still richer with an occasional trace of previously used colours.

The work with the layers culminated in a painting later entitled 60 Days of Red, Blue, and Yellow. In this painting, all three colours most favoured by the artist have equal validity, the concept of the work consists in examining the qualities of an extremely large size canvas (378 x 794 cm) with the standard wavy line as the only multistratified element which stretches over the whole surface of the canvas; the struc-tures were replaced gradually, the colours altered regularly, the artist working with thinned acrylic paint (one spoonful of paint per one litre of water).The unusual transparency of the singular layer of colour allows the addition of colour intensi-ty when the layers shift - the result is an extremely subtle effect which we have to perceive in much the same way the artist did - physically, during exhausting daily work on the piece (eight to ten hours a day of maximum concentration). Such an experience must have been something new to him, the extreme strain later brought about a certain harmony and calmness, as the artist states himself. In the first place, however, the work and time here are visualized; even if most layers are hidden, their presence in the whole work acts as a fundamental quality of expression. Moreover, the viewer can see the painting as a whole or approach various details and see particular situations. The painting process is tailored to its theme and grasped as a means of articulation to head towards an order which is not unequivocally verifiable. Kvíčala had to enter the painting much in the way of Jackson Pollock, but with a new aim: to give the repetition of the individualized ornament a dimension which (vertically) forms a new contact between the viewer and the work. Similar solutions were to follow in paintings of standard size, but the subsequent series of work was char-acterized by a new concept enhancing the orientation of the artist once again. This time it was covering the surface with a colour plane, most frequently white or gold (the choice of gold is another manifestation of the artist's understanding of the painting as something festive, beyond the everyday, and might remind us of the function of gold in Gothic paintings or Orthodox icons). The starting point is an almost minimal-ist structure of three wavy lines in the artist's basic "Mondrianesque" colours. The artist strives to cover the entire area around them; it provides him with a tool employed to dematerialize the coloured lines which in fact makes them thinner. Once again it is an extremely slow process, time-consuming, almost time-wasting, however, it is the only way to have the thin line of colour not exactly drawn but individually articulated in every place, with a hint of white or gold as a material touch of colour (compact or textured) executed in layers of paint. Once again the artist saw that what was concealed remains present in the final painting, that the quality of the painting constitutes all the processes contained within it, even those we appear not to see. In the next series, Kvíčala arrives at the aesthetic qualities of other solutions based on these principles, first of all in the differentiation of segments of diverse colours. Thus beauty (why not talk about beauty?) emerges of rather complex composition, sometimes limited by the interrupted white line, at other times using the combination of the colours of the lines and planes. The resulting configurations are morphologically varied and still determined by a simple basic principle, ensuring the validity of the relationship between lines and planes as two mutually complementary qualities. Gradually the artist arrived at a certain morphological alteration - what could be the close of this series, a painting with structures of wavy lines and loops combined with structures based on straight lines fixed together in a regular ornamental belt of "teeth" or meanders. This has naturally changed the visual and semantic relations within the plane of the painting which is again concealed by the white structure, while the coloured lines are formed by making the preceding coloured line thinner with the white paint. The deliberately thinner edges of the colour line appear as an original aesthetic quality. There are many possibilities to expand the compositional variations of these covered structures. It is the new morphology discovered by Kvíčala, however, which provided him with the starting point for yet another solution which enabled him to avoid accen-tuating the subtle character of the whole process, a process signalling artificiality, the "artistic" quality of the highly sensitive work. His present path has led, on the contrary, to broad, full brushstrokes, forming the painting as a total sum of these combinations of new structures - a robust integral work dominated by thick lines and their mutual interplay. The painting is almost fully covered and the colours on its surface intersect abundantly, creating a fascinating local context. Moreover, the chosen colour scale is brought into the present context in its signal-like, even non-artificial quali-ties, corresponding with the colour scale of our environment. All this, however, remains in the work of Petr Kvíčala as nothing less than the promotion of an order. It is once again this search for new forms of this individualized "freehand geometry" and, of course, another view of the ornament as a constitutive element of the picture/painting, which has been discovered for us by an artist who today rates among the most important figures on the Czech art scene.