The exhibition at Hauch Gallery features selected works by painter Jiří Matějů dating from the last two years. Jiří Matějů is a solitary figure on the Czech scene, working quietly and intently on developing his own unique artistic style and presenting himself at exhibitions mainly outside the center of activity of prominent art galleries.
At the same time, his visual language is characterized by an unusual philosophical depth and continually improving craftsmanship (acquired through his restoration work). For many years Matějů has been interested in psychology, Buddhism, philosophy and other sciences, the study of which he considers to be perfectly natural for an artist. He has exchanged his views and opinions on the world and various facts for several years with philosophers Miroslav Petříček and Václav Bělohradský. Matějů defines his work as a visual metaphor; Professor Petříček has further elaborated it by saying, “In Matějů’s paintings, color becomes a metaphor of light.”
The basic building blocks of Matějů’s paintings are color and line, whose resulting composition may look technicist at first glance, but in each structure there is an imprint of human dimension. It is revealed through a play with the sense of sight. “I am only interested in the face of a painting, not in a face in the painting. I am trying to replace storytelling and narrative subtext by the subtext of a metaphor, a visual metaphor, so that what is visible could become visual. I aim at abstraction, the story of color itself, in which one can feel an encounter with one another, i.e., something fundamentally common, a link,” describes his work Matějů, for whom at the moment color means his conception of utopia; hence the exhibition’s title. “Such a utopia can also be mental or intuitive. I try not to lose direction, not to stray on the way towards it,” says Matějů.
In Matějů’s recent works, which are presented at the exhibition, there has been a fundamental formal transformation – the symmetrical networks of lines typical of Matějů gradually disappear and give way to infinite space which has been implied by them. This move to an even simpler and more abstract form has happened naturally; we can say with exaggeration that it was just a matter of time of the artist’s development. The line as such has been replaced by a crumpled canvas either over the entire area of the painting (for example, in the triptych First Meeting Place, Second Meeting Place, Third Meeting Place), or only a part of a large canvas. These paintings are always preceded by studies in the form of crumpled paper, i which Matějů examines structures of asymmetric symmetry, such as can be observed on the water surface, whose uniform area is a composite of many small waves. In the monumental painting To You Who Are Not the Subject Matter of My Experience this structure subdivides the canvas which is more than five meters long in golden ratio. Given its size, this painting had to be done in a makeshift barn at a cottage in countryside, and only during daylight, without using any artificial lighting. The canvas cannot be taken in at a glance; the viewer is made to walk along its length and stop several times.
Matějů in his work directly refers to some aspects of late Modernist painting, and his latest paintings take into account even more the principles of Abstract Expressionism, specifically one of its tendencies, Color Field Painting. Its representative Mark Rothko heralded the development of painting towards clarity and elimination of all obstacles between the painting and the idea, the idea and the viewer. However, Rothko considered geometry to be one of these obstacles. His formal language was color, light, hieratic layout, surfaces, abstract shapes, symmetry and size. While with Rothko the viewer has taken the position of the abandoned area of the painting, something similar is taking place in Matějů’s works.
The viewer is surrounded by the uniform field of color and the monumental size of the painting. There is a dramatic relationship in which the surface with an obscure irritating (non-)color scheme and physical manipulation presents something which goes beyond the physical aspect of painting itself. This infinite abstraction is underpinned by a consistent desire to express the feeling and meaning of a complex idea in a simple way. In addition to the above-mentioned paintings, there is a series of 99 simple watercolor drawings. These drawings were created during evenings in the autumn and winter of last year, unlike paintings done by Matějů during daytime. They are reminiscent of the line, and their book format suggests that they are guided by the pursuit of simplicity of Zen Buddhist thought. The lines are washed out by color stains which disrupt the need for controlled activity. The drawings seem to testify to the fragility and temporality of human existence, like the duality of the asymmetricsymmetry in the monumental painting and the triptych. Their number, the highest double digit, acquires many connotations with its division and by extension the installation options of this series – once 99; once 33 and 66; three times 33 – with which Matějů sometimes works in the poetic titles of his works.
Text by Monika Čejková
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Curator:
Monika Čejková
Full exhibition
6/11– 12/12 2015, Hauch Gallery, Prague – Czech Rep.