If our destinies are predetermined, what place does that go away free of charge will? For luck? For probability? Vojtěch Kovařík confronts the problem in his work – and with the present exhibition at Museum Kampa, he steps into the third dimension: the graceful floor of his work are accompanied by reliefs and sculptures, with the artist’s path main from strains that divide the canvas to sculptural works.
The themes on this exhibition are common, relating the very foundations of Euro-American civilization. Even as we speak within the third millennium, historic myths, gods and goddesses, Titans, heroes and heroines are all nonetheless related, their strong varieties exceeding the monumental format of the work. We may even see them as archetypes, whose tales and actions have served since time immemorial to mark the boundaries and potentialities of our personal passage by means of life and seek for which means.
These outsized heroes are megalopsychoi, the great-souled males, the primary individualities. Maybe that’s the reason we might solely catch a glimpse of them by means of the window body of the canvas, not of their entirety. Sisyphus sinks underneath the burden of his actions. The parting lovers Eros and Psyche undergo the burden of predestination. The labours of Heracles communicate to the fulfilment of future, the primary of those being to coach the Nemean lion. Simply as Zeus’s son made himself invulnerable wrapped in his lion pores and skin, so too does the painter face increasingly more challenges that appear unattainable to beat. The diminished setting of the work consists of a stylized inside and Mediterranean panorama, fertile and arid, nightfall or daybreak, inlets, deserts, and oases.
The artist’s method is genuine: a distinctive syncresis of the influences of antiquity, modernity, and the digital current. Within the fifteen centuries for the reason that fall of Rome, there have been a number of intervals, Renaissance and Classicist, which have drawn on antiquity. We are able to see right here the monumental morphology of Picasso and types of the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. Kovařík doesn’t conceal his admiration for late Twentieth-century German Expressionism, or for the work of Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. He’s additionally fascinated by new discoveries in Pompeii, such because the exceptional ‘black room’. The current is conveyed in web-design gradients, step by step transitioning from one color to a different. The figures assume frozen statuesque postures, emphasised by the profile contour of their faces. The artist renders their limbs in varied manners – an embrace, a gesture of introspection, a brutal struggle – as matter that may be remodeled to the utmost, with out regard for anatomical elements.
