SLOVACKE MUZEUM GALLERY, UHERSKE HRADISTE (CZ)
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.
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.
