Pavel Piekar, born in 1960, studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University (ÈVUT) in Prague, and he received his art training with Bohumil Kutil and the textile artists Jan and Jenny Hladík. Impulses he received through his studies have connected in his work in a fortuitous way: They have inscribed themselves not only in the demanding technique of his colour linocuts but can also be observed in his drawings.
Even though the drawings originated directly in front of the given motifs, they betray more than a mere sensuous fascination with architecture and the landscape. Piekar scrutinizes the building material, which has already been shaped by human will, and in the same way he scrutinizes the outlines of the landscape, which was shaped by internal geological forces. He thereby exposes the process of weathering, as if the architraves and columns, adorned with an abundance of elaborate details, were returning back to the matter from which they originated.
These unstoppable returns are symbolized — regardless of the geographical provenance of the motifs — by the tumultuous water surface on which the shapes of Venice and its churches or illuminated Adriatic ports merge into a nearly indecipherable jumble of stains. We find the key to this fascinating reflection, however, on the very same picture plane — in an identifiable landscape, a concrete city, a precisely depicted building.
In classical painting, the picture was usually perceived — at least on one level — as a sort of mirror of the world. While this immediate connection has been disputed in many respects, it hasn’t lost its attractiveness — and not just for the viewer but also for the artist. For the artist it is, above all, an appeal to move beyond mere looking towards — as Oskar Kokoschka called it — vision, so that — in the words of Paul Klee — he captures not only things that are visible but also manages to bring to light things that are less obvious to the mere eye.
To precisely copy things we see is a matter of technical craftsmanship. To reproduce the way an expanse of white wall dissolves in the rays of the sun, or to capture the reflection of an illuminated city on the water’s turbulent and constantly changing surface, and to find a convincing shorthand for it all, is more difficult. And to make visible what is at first glance imperceptible, thus to express the essence, find the inner meaning, is a task still more difficult.
“In the twentieth century, art — as opposed to craft — was believed to be the product of an intellectual concept, not of technique at all,“ notes Piekar. He adds concisely: “When an artist learns his craft too well, he makes bad art.“ In other words, perfect technique cannot be the goal in art, because this can much more easily be accomplished by tools. The border between a merely optically perfect description of reality, a situational report on the things around us, and a work of art linking to further meanings must be discovered anew each time. “Already for decades I have been trying to learn my craft as perfectly as possible — for the purpose of figural compositions — to study the Old Masters.“ It is exactly composition that is the border between ars and technica. It doesn’t have to do only with proportions and the distribution of matter across the picture plane, because even that can be expressed by numbers in the end, but it determines the ratio within which you may apply your signature style, stylize forms, harmonize colours.
The drawings which Pavel Piekar brought back from his travels through Italy, Croatia and the Šumava region of south Bohemia unquestionably possess this immediacy of “vision”. At the same time, though, they reach beyond it — to a search for a fitting and each time different composition.
Anita Pelánová
Prague
February 2010