ARTIST PROFILE

Bretislav Maly

  • Czech Republic (b. 1985 in Hradec kralove)
  • Currently in Brno, Czech Republic.
  • Education : 2011 Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava MgA. Klaudie Kosziby (traineeship) 2007 Academy in Poznan prof. zw. Wlodzimierz Dudkowiaka (traineeship) 2006 - 2012 Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, Fisherman 125/13/15, by doc. Vesely and doc. Lahoda

ARTIST STATEMENT

  •  Sum up the main character of your work, your long-term interests and themes. 

I became completely absorbed by the world of colour, going from brief observations of the sky or the structures of invertebrates and rocks to reading literature. It’s a mutual hunt. I feel pursued by colours, but sometimes it inverts and it is me tracking them. It is all much more complicated than this, of course, because we perceive space on the basis of colour contexts. Our circadian rhythms are controlled by light. Colours can evoke moods. So art reflects strong social themes. I see artwork and working with colours as a way of talking about everyday things.

  • Describe the context of your work – what are your inspirational sources and theoretical starting points, which artists and tendencies do you consider as referential to your work.

I come across something new and have to mediate it to others. I worked with Wittgenstein’s texts for a long time, considering what happens when a context minutely changes. Based on that I made paintings with unusual constructions. They suddenly became objects which work using light and shadow, the way sculptures do. It’s a game with words. One thing is what we see, another what it is, and yet another what we call it. Playing with words is crucial for our perception of colours. The portfolio includes paintings about the contexts of colours. I put together a table of wavelengths of colours that I use. I reconstructed some artistic processes, procedures and theories of colour from the painter’s perspective. I have been using graphs to paint a problem approached purely on the basis of the relationship of colours, for example to show what happens between yellow and orange. I am interested in defining the relationship correctly. This project generated striped processual paintings. Recently I have been fascinated by the surface of the painting and I was very impressed by the show Abstract Spatial in 2016 in Kremz. I am interested in how the surface area deforms under the weight of connotations of the theme and in what the viewers experience. The painting manipulates them and they manipulate the artwork. It is Kafka-like. Everything is changeable and all that is left is visual gluttony. 

  • Try to characterize what makes your work specific, wherein lies its force, what makes it different from the work of artists with similar approaches and themes.

I believe artistic creations should be spontaneous. If you want to talk to someone, you have to be open and able to polemicise with your own truth. 

  • What is your work process like? Do you deal with preparation and research? How do you search for your themes? How do you choose the media you work in?

That’s how I work. Designs start who knows how long in advance; I keep coming back to them. I read something, because I spot something somewhere, and it all just sits around for a while. A lot is discarded because in the end I see it’s silly. That’s a normal process. A lot of the work ends up in the bottom drawer. There are a lot of by-products when I work with chemical substances, for example with pigments that change colour. They seem just ordinarily attractive, but after some years, once I started to get to know them more, it all makes better sense. I made works of art that cannot represent themselves. 

  • What is your vision for the future? How do you want to develop your work and continue your previous projects/realizations? What is your long-term goal/dream?

It is hard to make prognoses. I have been looking into art verging on scenography. Of course, I like beautiful paintings, but their strictness is their disadvantage, limiting in that the painting only communicates with the viewer through its body, the canvas and the frame. I see the real potential in the viewer’s experience. I don’t see a reason to stop painting, but I’d like to focus on acts in painting and on mediating a way of thinking.


BIOGRAPHY

 Education:

2011
Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava in studio of MgA. Klaudia Kosziba , Bratislava, Slovakia (traineeship)

2007
Academy in Poznan in studio prof. zw. Wlodzimierz Dudkowiak , Poznan, Poland (traineeship)

2006 - 2012
Faculty of Fine Arts VUT in Brno, Brno, Czech Republic (2007 by doc. Thomas Lahoda, 2006 - 07 by doc. Petr Vesely

Responsibility towards the tradition of the medium of painting frequently imposed limits on artists’ decisions about how painting, with both its fundamental and additional components, should be approached. It was the confidence of modernism that started to accentuate autonomy culminating in the era of reductive, abstract approaches in painting, having eliminated contextual excesses towards romanticising spirituality. Artist’s autonomy was further supported in the era of (post)conceptual thematization of the determiners of visuality.
From a cursory glance at Břetislav Malý’s paintings a viewer might succumb to the impression that he is looking at one of many forms of abstract painting, spanning lyrical or structural abstraction and painting with roots in minimalism, seasoned by optical illusion. The artist, however, is not aiming at either of these approaches. Břetislav Malý researches the painting itself, or, to be accurate – its fundamental parts: colours, methods in which they are used, options in their layering and application and their interaction on top of each other or when they overlap. Břetislav Malý thinks about painting without the props of verbal interpretation. In other words – he thematises colour by colour, feeling no need to comment on it.
Such a tautological thought about a subject is a key theme in the philosophy of language. It is not surprising how often Břetislav Malý mentions the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who in his Remarks on Colour considers colours as a phenomenon related to speech. Wittgenstein examines how we think about colours when we talk about them, and how these utterances affect the way colours are perceived. The problem of transmission with (no) losses of meaning and content between the medium of painting on one hand, and the world of speech or text on the other resonates in Břetislav Malý’s work yet again, even though this time differently than in the era of conceptual research in the field of analytical philosophy. The approach he selected enabled him to separate what is seemingly inseparable: he freed word and image from their traditional interdependence. His paintings do not repeat the rational-analytical description of the use and reflection of colour in speech, or, on the contrary, speech in colour. His painting seems to confirm Wittgenstein’s words: ‘That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent’.
To perceive Malý’s painting, nothing else but a keen and thoughtful eye is needed, whose role it is to scan contemplatively the surfaces of canvases and “to stumble upon” the colour residues of the foundation areas, or upon the ways in which individual layers have been treated. Or, upon their pastose rendering, subtle transitions between the chosen hues, or upon the deconstruction of orthogonal spatiality of a painting. The artist’s thinking as a painter and an analyst is totally freed of expectations of a traditional narrative and mimetic functions of painting. It also bravely discards binding logocentric disbalance between word and image, declaratively and logically siding with the image. Colour in Břetislav Malý’s paintings is and remains to be factual – as if we wanted to say that colour is colour is colour. Always the same, always itself while always different – different thanks to multiplying and changeable relations and ephemeral links between local and dominant colouring, and between its various renderings.

Martin Mikolášek