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Ivan Komárek, who recently
celebrated his fiftieth birthday, has occupied a unique place in the
development of Czech figural art over the past twenty years. Although
his generation is linked with the strong emergence of young artists
during the second half of the 1980s who identified (consciously or
not) with the Postmodernist transcribing and re-interpreting of
‘original’ historical sources, Komárek himself remained apart from
group programmes of that time. He didn’t look for his own form of
expression in the friction of direct social involvement or in the
ironic negation of previous artistic models. On the contrary, in his
youth he drew positive and acknowledged inspiration from his family
and its cultural roots, and during his later formative years he was
influenced by Jan Smetana, his professor at the Prague Academy of Fine
Arts, and Jan Bauch, a leading figure of Czech 20th-century figural
painting. Komárek has never needed an ideological platform or the
back-up structure of (real or pretended) conceptual aims. In his work
he doesn’t hide behind anything that might be alien to his ideas or
emotions. The nakedness of the figures he depicts seems to signal that
their presence and actions are not merely a substitutive ‘game’ but a
message about the true core of the human spirit – no matter how
bizarre that core might be.
Tellingly entitled
‘Depositary’, this exhibition presents the early chapter of Ivan
Komárek’s work during which he formulated his artistic language, tried
out various possible paths and experimented in both form and
technique. With the hindsight of more than twenty years it is,
however, clear that the foundations of his creative vision were
already laid at that time: above all we can follow how his picture, so
to speak, bursts out of the desire to explore, the irrepressible need
to reveal and redesign the human domain in the effort to clarify
complex mutual relationships as the driving force of humanity. In
Komárek’s drawings, the space of this exploration is spontaneously
defined by fluent lines and collaged, non-perspectival areas, while
his paintings are dominated by an almost sculpturally conceived
plasticity and monumentality. The mentally charged space of all
Komárek’s works is characteristically reinforced by expressive colours
and the grotesque exaggeration of form.
Komárek’s work from
the period focused on by this show, 1981-1987, shows how soon his
original world found a crystallised and deep-rooted identity. It is a
world that is (with minor exceptions) closed off to momentary social
and political affairs, one that is fully rounded in its wealth of
emotional (and rational) reflections and ever open to new human
experiences and artistic approaches. The person that Komárek portrays
in the 1980s is already an heroic-erotic being who plays out a natural
story unburdened by moral commentary or existential pathos. The
intimacy of Komárek’s people attracts us or repels us, though their
universal quality reminds us that in them we find at least a fragment
of our own reflection.
Richard Drury
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