The real and the abstract mix in Pavel Prikasky’s pictures like fluids in laboratory solutions, the picture layers simulate the surface of a body or systems of internal material changes. Currents of nutrients flow through the painting, the pictures carry a micro world, hybrid physical bodies appear. He links to current phenomena such as genetic modification or medical practice. He approaches his painting as in growing a culture, like a live tissue, bio-matter.

Here I re-evaluate for myself what is abstract painting: it is not just ‘’colour field painting’’, but there are also specific links and images. I am interested in hybrid phenomena and I try to transfer them to my own thoughts about a picture.

Večeřová and Příkaský seek to blur the lines between their disciplines placing works within one another, layering connections and conversations. Throughout these interactions the artists consistently steer a course between figuration and abstraction, the narrative and the incidental giving their collaborations the space in which to speak.

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Pavel Příkaský vystudoval malbu na Akademii výtvarných umění v Praze, a přestože se prostřednictvím daného média i nadále vyjadřuje, dlouhodobě ve své tvorbě znejasňuje jeho okraje.

V malbě pracuje s organickými materiály jako vosk, latex, textilní třásně. Prostřednictvím třásní se obrazy někdy propojují a jakoby vzájemně vyživují, jindy „stékají“ na podlahu galerie.

reflektoval hybridní momenty současnosti, jako je například kyselý déšť nebo genetická manipulace.

Hybridita je tématem i v samotném malířském provedení, v němž se plošné struktury a materiály místy prolínají s iluzivním motivem zvířecího těla, abstrakcí odvozenou z mikrosnímku kapky vody nebo vědecko-mytologickými hybridy lidí a zvířat.

Ve spolupráci s Miroslavou Večeřovou, v rovině umělecké metafory používá Příkaský postupy současné medicíny, a to jak při stanovování „umělecké diagnózy“, tak při následné „léčbě“. Na tělech performerů i na stěnách galerie nebo v médiu videa často používají autoři pigmenty, které mají medicínské využití – například genciánová violeť nebo Pařížská modř je užívaná jako malířský pigment ale také jako lék v tabletách proti ozáření nebo jako protilátka při otravě thaliem (toxický prvek který je součástí nových technologií).

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Pavel Příkaský studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague, and though he still works with this medium, he blurs and obscures its boundaries using photography, fragments, series and installations. When working with photographs he is interested in the defects that this “perfect” instrument of depiction suffers. Recurring motifs are disappearance, fuzziness and over-exposure, colour deflection and the overlapping of individual images that takes place if light-sensitive paper is exposed several times to another negative. However, the artist less interested in the properties of photography but more in the saturation of the world by the photography image and film and says of his approach that it is more intuitive and independent on the surrounding reality.

The fragment finds its way into Příkaský’s paintings often in connection with work in a specific environment that implies discontinuity. One of these environments would be the Trafačka Gallery, where in the installation Nižší napětí / Low Voltage, 2014 he combined the flaky wall with the austere font of Times New Roman. He took a similar approach in the exhibition Najdeš ji v levém uchu / Look in Your Left Ear at the Mimochodem Gallery (2014). Here, however, an important role was played by the environment of the vestibule of what had been a precisely designed metro station. Příkaský drew on this historical reference to reveal the fictive remains of murals. It is clear that the fragments of paintings by the artist refer to the work of the memory and the operation of recollections. A possible historical parallel, especially as regards the more densely painted works in which the artist uses the entire surface of the canvas, could be the artificialism of Štýrský and Toyen. However, unlike these artists Příkaský works with far more real and realistically depicted objects.

Příkaský has recently been working on installations and video installations with Miroslava Večeřová (Díl první: Jazyk Krajiny / Part One: Language of the Landscape, 2013 and Dvojité dno / Double Bottom, 2014 and Díl druhý: Umělé dýchání / Part Two: Artificial Breathing, 2014). Here too the question of the possibility of representation remains important. The paradox of this endeavour to represent objects is captured by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Notes on the Return and other essays, in which he says that the object that we observe for too long escapes us and disappears. The portrayal of several objects that Příkaský selects for his series of pictures disappears in a similar fashion.

Author of the annotation Tereza Hrušková  Artlist

Published2015

The word Polysemy refers to the capacity of a sign, image or word to have more than one meaning. This exhibition is the fourth in a series of collaborations between London based Večeřová and Prague based Příkaský combing painting, performance, video and site specific performance in a unique creative dialogue. For Polysemy the exhibition space is simultaneously installation, stage and a site of performance. Adopting the visual language and commercial tropes of high street medical providers, the exhibition takes its form from a new collaborative video work, Inner Monologue (Večeřová and Příkaský , 2016) which was shot partly within a doctor’s surgery. The waiting room aesthetic, embracing the architecture of the gallery and its shop front context, creates a looping meta reference between art work, location and audience. The installation itself becomes an artwork, an intervention within the landscape of shop fronts, offices and private residencies. The uncertainty created between the visual appearance of the installation and it’s operation as art work speaks to the artists’ concerns with ambiguity in relation both to their use of imagery and it’s reception. Narrative and figuration combine with abstractions and ambiguous signifiers to create a mysterious and fragmented view of the world which, perhaps superficially recognisable at times, remains elusive and out of reach, like a sensation of déjà vu. There is a richness in the tension between the apparent familiarity of the wider image and the strangeness of it’s details. Polysemy weaves together large scale, microscopic photographic images with sculptural interventions in the gallery space, abstract painting with video work and perhaps most mysteriously a huge image of a woman about to undertake an MRI scan. The sterile environment, bulky equipment, tubes and flimsy medical robes combine in the familiar medical trope. However, rather than being prompted to a refection on the patient’s predicament, the viewer is drawn to her feet: smeared with pastel yellows and blues, in a manner reminiscent of the Indian Holi festival of colour. This use of colour, it’s juxtaposition with the larger sense of the image, transforms both the woman’s participation and the image’s power as a whole, into something altogether more performative. The painting and other interventions in the space that punctuate the installation are imbued with the same sense of ambiguity. First appearing as gently coloured, abstracted forms, they contain a more complex index. Figurative forms emerge from the images; an eye, a mouth, they speak to the perception that is gained from stillness. The relationship between image, action and space reoccurs throughout the installation. It is conceived as a work which can be experienced from the street or within the gallery. One can pass by with a glance or come in and wait. Look. Perhaps become part of the work for those walking by, figurative additions within a conceptual construct in which the action in the space becomes part of the image. Not all these tableaux will be happen stance. In addition to the their works and sculptural interventions, Večeřová will work with Příkaský to devise a new performance within the installation, developing its formal concerns and further interrogating the relationship between image, sculpture and performance. This performance will be free and open to public, taking place at 3pm Saturday 12 May. Večeřová and Příkaský seek to blur the lines between their disciplines placing works within one another, layering connections and conversations. Throughout these interactions the artists consistently steer a course between figuration and abstraction, the narrative and the incidental giving their collaborations the space in which to speak. In expanding this language Polysemy becomes eponymous – an exhibition which is more than the sum of its parts, activated and articulated equally by viewer, performer and artist. In exploiting the potential of ambiguity in this way, disrupting visual expectation, the show becomes a space to reconsider the narratives constructed around us. -----'Ben Roberts is Director of the Artists’ Research Centre and Associate Curator at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts

Pavel Příkaský & Miroslava Večeřová: Images That Occupy Thoughts Fabruary 16 - March 17, 2017 Curator: Pavel Kubesa ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In their common projects, Pavel Příkaský and Miroslava Večeřová focus on intuitive, fluid installations which are basically framed by the medium of painting. Medium of painting is “infecting” the character of the work´s photographic element, the nature of installation in space, to evolve into what can be regarded as a living, performing corporeal entity. It becomes a device in the process of exploring a preconceptual world, a way of inducing feelings, an endeavour to make real the sensation of touch: it is something that relates the cognitive body with the irrational aspect of its existence. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A recurrent subject of Pavel Příkaský´s paintings are fragments of an animal´s body. There, as he believes, an animal actually “offers itself” as an aid on the way to the understanding of human corporeality: observing an animal, I feel as though I were observing myself, by way of comparison. In a picture, the image of an animal raises the viewer´s awareness of their own “self”, their own bodies. Thus it sets up a certain mode of subjectivity, a kind of tuning that carries us through a more complex aesthetic situation which has at its core concern with an elementary sensibility, i.e., corporeality as a clue to the Images That Occupy Thoughts. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Miroslava Večeřová balances out paintings with digital photographs depicting mundane objects of everyday use relating to the human body. Večeřová´s creative intervention consists in modifying the contextual situation in which these objects are set, which may be either an artificial stage set simulating natural environment, or a characteristic angle of view, choice of a particular photographic focus, or concentration on minuscule disruptions. Consequently, an ordinary “appliance” or tool are transported into a newly defined reality, a fictional sort of nature, wherein products of civilization figure as newly engendered bodies of familiar creatures. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Příkaský and Večeřová take their treatment of the subject of corporeality further, to a wider cultural area. They are concerned with the ways in which we become aware of our bodies, how they are formed in response to the surrounding world, but also with the ways in which the human body itself partakes in structuring the surrounding world and in modifying its nature. Their images of an animal tail, horns, or of a crocodile´s grin, are to some extent questions about the condition of the purported human domination of this planet, which we have taken for granted as a one-way source of energy used for the fulfilment of our own privatized aims. To be sure though, by no means do Pavel and Miroslava aspire to postulate there an a priori doctrine of social criticism – they don´t necessarily regard the exponentially accruing potential of new hi-tech technologies as means of distancing us from a natural state. Rather, they assign them the status of a legitimate component of that which we have become used to define as nature. All that said, they regard this type of externalization of the senses in terms of a potential atavism: for them, new technologies and modes of the world of creation enable us to grow new appendages, or “tails” on our bodies, suggesting a regression to lower evolutionary stages of our genus. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ An interesting commentary that is of relevance to Images That Occupy Thoughts can be found in the book by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, Úvahy o postmoderní době (“Essays on the Postmodern Time”, texts edited by Bauman for publication in Czech: “The human body is today primarily an organ of consumerism, and its appropriate condition is judged by its capacity to absorb and accept everything offered by the consumerist society. The postmodern body is above all a recipient of experiences. It consumes and digests experiences.” The relevant word here happens to be “digestion”. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ A similar situation is illustrated by a mural painting that permeates the gallery space, linking together the individual paintings on display. In the wall painting, Příkaský and Večeřová use the formal motif of an intestine which they “elongate” ad infinitum, disporoportionately to its natural physiological shape, extending it so as to encompass the entire perimeter of the walls. As a digestive organ, the intestine may serve as a metaphor of the postmodern body, a projection of Bauman´s “gatherer of delights”, a limitless digestive tract. The gallery walls thus become a scale model of the human body, a “timeline” of its performance during which our mind is occupied by a stream of images. Příkaský and Večeřová are concerned with this sense of reversal, visualisation of the internal, the shift of the inner onto the surface. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This particular aspect is likewise reflected in these artist´s treatment of the medium and object of painting: namely, they both aspire to step out of the pictorial surface, into the surrounding space, to turn the painting itself inside out – to let its material (i.e., emotions) enter into space, to bring to life the imagined, to materialize feeling. In Images That Occupy Thoughts, they have arguably reached the farthest point of their common trajectory: here, the image and painting do not overflow into the surrounding space only by way of installing interventions (the use of tassels, relief sealant brushwork, superimposition of painting over digital imagery), but newly also by stepping out of the pictorial surface through minimalistic, visually controlled performance, a sort of staged tableaux-vivants. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ At that point, they part ways with Bauman. The latter believes that those who “strive for physical performance,” i.e., who consume delights, “are haunted by anxiety which cannot be permanently dispelled by any form of performance and by any type of effort.” For the gatherers of delight there exists no remedy, as “each will only bring them a short-term, temporary relief, and their trust in its magic powers will evanesce soon after intake”, wherefore “they engage in frenzied search for new miracle cures and magic formulas...” For their part, however, Příkaský and Večeřová set their performances into exactly the opposite context: that of a state of relaxation, rest, stepping out of the stream of images on the imaginary timeline in an outward direction, meaning towards themselves. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The interesting aspect that concerns the two artists´ is their approach to the question of abstraction. There is a plausible analogy between the very process of abstraction and digestion in the sense of reduction of material: abstraction is no more the question of style, but much more the way of treating the topic. Though some of the paintings are non-figurative, they ought to be interpreted more than anything else as large-scale details, zoom-in views of the microcosm of the cells, detail views of the human skin, water or blood. Thereby, they become something like visual allergens whose purpose is to induce the process of imagination of a sensory perception. There, abstraction comes to play the part of a tool of the artists´ analytical reasoning which they apply in their common projects, while the actual creative output as such remains predominantly representational, illusive.