BLANSKO GALLERY, BLANSKO (CZ)
Břetislav Malý undoubtedly explores the medium of painting with an utmost intensity. Reflecting painting itself has got its great tradition, be it the awareness of colors and their imanent dispositions, compositional schemes, or the painterly technique itself. Nevertheless, these activities were always intertwined with themes, motifs - with iconographic reasons for painting. In a number of cases, artists were close to a complex, nearly scientific research; pioneers of abstraction are a case in point as far as colors are concerned, for example.
During the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, paiting has reached the limits of its modernist possibilities by exploiting the notions of structure, texture, and ultimately monochromatic abstraction. Absolute painting became intellectual counterpoint of conceptual approaches saturated by philosophy, which were expanding across the whole post-war artistic field. Postmodern explosion of the eighties has loosened themes, gestures, and decent manners of painting with its liberated wild painterly terrorism and gave up seeking insights into itself; externality had its dionisic feast. Punk energy lasts only for a while though; painting and painters have calmed down, became smoother and more orderly. They left the painted world go on, fertilized by a unique explosion, as they always had had in history.
Liberated painting was hence given the means even in the years to come to synthesize different possibilites – artistsic, social, technical, and iconographic. Neomodernism seems to be one of the latest gains; with a varying degree of confusion, artists explore the highlights of modern and modernist trends which swept across the 20th century. The combinatorics of painterly possibilites seems endless even now that there are artists diving into the morernist adventure with utmost passion. Geometrical construction, color concepts, playful reversals of subject and object, aesthetical expedition beyond the canvas and beyond the image, all these are premises which a contemporary artist obsessed by painting can count upon. Břetislav Malý is one of those who is finding his place and the reasons why paint in this fast flowing stream of the medium.
Martin Dostál
Those who look for red will first see blue and green
Not only is the research of colours, their classification and the technology of mixing influenced by the sciences of physics, chemistry and biology; the nature of colour has also been debated by leading philosophers. Various existing theories have been in a state of change under the influence of new research in optics. The topic of colour has been a keystone of visual arts since the beginning and so it is reflected in the title of Břetislav Malý’s current show “About red in time”. How we see and perceive colours and distinguish them is not simply a matter of biology; it is socio-cultural. Secret recipes for mixing and applying colours attract the audience, be it laymen or specialists. Using X-ray or newer technologies enables the naked eye to see through the invisible history of painting, to reveal its secret layers or the artist’s techniques. The compound noun ‘cross-section’ is more than symbolic under these circumstances and layers uncovered like prehistoric rock formations can surprise. The cross-section will reveal both the technology and influences of other artists.
Břetislav Malý has been systematically focusing on principles of mixing and dividing colours, seemingly pointing primarily towards the tradition of abstract painting. It is, however, somewhat more complicated than this. Despite his rather conservative approach to painting, his thinking has recently been exploring science and the concept in general, most notably in the titles of his pieces (such as the series “Ludwig flying a kite” or “Five grey stripes of Daniel Buren” in the current show). The artist directs the viewer via the titles towards his own reading, lightening the weight of serious, deep abstraction. As well as optics he studied colour division in a specialised laboratory at Brno University of Technology. His fascination with the laws of physics and chemistry is passed onto the viewer, drawing him or her into the painter’s inner world. The impasto of the painting destroys the base and forms a relief rather than a painting. The series on show in Blansko also made me think immediately of tapestries, both for the colours and the formats.
The two most dominant pieces resembling tapestries share multiple similarities – they are both sizeable, reaching beyond classical format, and with layers of paint forming a fabric-like mass. The exhibition space in Blansko Town Gallery works exquisitely for such formats and the artist has made the best use of it, populating the room with a mere two pieces for airy, spacious effect. Like an altar, “The complete space of the warm scale” breaks open and develops the installation. The cross construction of the frame and the method of attaching the painting to the pillar by a blue strap and carabiners enhances its sacred element. The classic shape is most disputed in the large-format piece from the series, “Ludwig flying a kite”, where the frame is completely absent, its function symbolically substituted by five vertical laths spaced out evenly on the front of the painting, leaning against the wall and resembling a pliant metal sheet. The large centrepiece, a substantial blue oval titled “The complete space of three elementary colours”, entices the viewer to lose track of hours as if enchanted by the surface of a vast lake.
The curator of the exhibition Martin Dostál sees the focal point of the show in the borders between colours, where the red colour is ultimately “a guide between the borders which were set by the red itself”. Anyone looking for red in the show might, however, be taken by surprise because what the eye sees primarily is cobalt blue. Red only appears more prominently on one canvas – “The shape of red in space”.
It can be asked whether red needed to have been included at all. As a feature of composition, most certainly – but the show would work even without such a counterpoint. The unexpected starting point of the colour is highly functional, making the observer reconsider colour and look for the limits of red, ponder mixing, consider why we see the colour the way we see it and wonder whether others see it as we do. The uncertainty carries over to the titles, explicitly referring to the works of Ludwig Wittgenstein and to the method of installing the pieces, turning the paintings into objects. When I met the artist as the curator of his show “The dissipation of space as a consequence of the synthesis of colour” in The Youth Gallery last year, he insisted on an installation that would not turn the paintings into objects, yet he did not exclude the possibility in the future. It did not take too long and his solution is, in the end, courageous and grand. The space is used with precision and everything is in its place. The individual pieces attract and repel each other simultaneously, which is not surprising, given that most of them contain metal pigments and are magnetic. The author discloses this principle in one of the smaller pieces in the series “Ludwig flying a kite”, in which small round magnets in the painting form a collage with a 17-times photocopied portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Břetislav Malý does not bother with cutting the profile out meticulously; instead, he creates varieties of the profile, gradually forming a kite. The kite is released into the world; where it flies does not only depend on the author and the curator but also on the viewers and their interpretations. Those who look for red may find blue and green.
Zuzana Janečková
