Pavel Kryz
The artistic transformations of Pavel Kříž, J.Kapusta junior, 2006
The artistic transformations of Pavel Kříž
Pavel Kříž /Kryz/ graduated from Karel Souček’s painting studio at the Academy of the Fine Arts in Prague in 1984. He left school and commenced his artistic career as a painter of his age, but not as a victim of the influences and pressures which were active upon his generation after the mid 1980s. He gambled on his own feelings, opinions and also the artistic traditions. At that time, he was already restoring wall murals, most frequently ornaments in classicist architecture. He intuitively perceived and accepted the order, structural nature and linearism of the buildings, in which he worked, and their predominantly decorative elements. The effects of architecture found expression in the general raster of his drawings, graphic art and paintings – the fundamental construction of the works; the details of architecture and the concatenated painted ornaments are then expressed in their details, rhythm and colourfulness. This is characteristic for his paintings at the end of the 1980s based on the principle of the propagation of the sub-motif and its rhythmic repetition throughout the entire painted surface. Sometimes a monumentalising shapely and linear rhythm and geometrical accuracy rose to a peak, but free, nervous drawings, which reworked the feelings from the historical ornaments and models, for whose aesthetic abilities and effects Kříž expressed great understanding, more frequently pranced beneath them. These playfully, patiently and keenly created pictures fully invoked the draughtsman’s mentality.
From 1990, a formerly latent painted sensuality struggled to the surface of the paintings. The more colour-specific surfaces bear brushwork with a content derived from nature. Sensuality penetrates onto the canvas via abstract plant inspirations and from photographs of perfected women. The painted richness of the constantly repeated symbol – now also in a newly geometric-abstract and figural form – communicates with the predominantly finely coloured background in a different perspective. The paintings of the 1990s constitute the harmonisation of the transposition of decorative models, geometric abstractions and drawn and painted works. The pictures involving the contrast of flat photography with applied painting in remarkable spatial and ornamental expression stand alone. It is, however, overly clear that for the moment Kříž’s painting involves rich, dynamic and mainly monochromatic drawings in paint with an organised, limited and balanced ornamental and geometric order.
In 2001, Pavel Kříž painted his water colours of an Apple and a Pear. These differed from his previous work in that they were his first painted depiction of reality as opposed to the mere use of the application of a photograph of a female nude. Apart from that, he also left the fruit to run off without the alignment of the colours, which was unlike him. He also repeated this procedure on other paintings. Despite the fact that the appearance and mood of more or less free wallpaper designs or roller-applied painted wall decorations was further preserved, these paintings meant a turning point in his creative work. He interrupted the artificial order of error-free, aesthetic and technically perfect decorativeness with free painting, albeit that he did so gently, but still penetratingly. From 2003, he created a number of flushed watercolour paintings on toned primer, in which everything, which until that time had been composed in his paintings to a supremely serious and balanced extent, became relaxed and broke out of the existing mould. The signature lost its strength and colour discipline and increasingly loosened into unrestrained paintings which assuredly even replaced the photography. The individual motifs were also only repeated to a limited extent; he began to ingeniously renew his painting.
Pavel Kříž was always of the opinion that paintings belong to the people and that paintings should bring them happiness and joy. He also lived up to this idea from the very beginning. He therefore did not depict things which irritate, stress and worry people. He unequivocally qualified his work with the ancient aesthetic of the wall ornaments in residential interiors. He allowed himself to be captivated by beauty and creativity and he single-mindedly attempted to humanise art today with the creation of a harmonic contrast between traditional creative art and contemporary thought and painting. It is good to see how he experienced joy from an ornament in his own painted adaptations in both his static and frenetic presentation. He also clearly expressed his relationship with the figure by inserting beautiful female body forms into his pictures using the principle of collage. He handled them as he required at the given moment, i.e. as an ornament – a perfect physical sign, a symbol reviving the painted relativity – and its development is different in reality.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Pavel Kříž created a geometrical decorative world with multiple plant and figural elements throughout the entire surface of the work – a landscape of pure creativity, which included that which he subsequently newly personified with his relaxed painting language.
In 2004, as if he had forgotten what he had done before, he painted several Mountains. The summary views of the snowy mountain panoramas accent the restless contour line of the horizons and the cold, expansive toned surfaces. Here, the transposition of the reality of the mountain relief into fine, colourfully abstemious paintings without perspective enabled him to use a beautiful Japanese-like calligraphic stylisation. He was similarly successful in his pictures of puppies in the snow. Then, with natural and instant certainty, he painted the Odalisque and Venus, an imposing variation of the female nudes of those masters of classicism and the renaissance, Ingres and Tiziano, which expanded the fixed classical painting style to include relaxed, joyful poses. Other paintings also occurred – a figural portrait of Hannah with a concentrated outline and the artistically consummate Cakes, completely freed of a decorative background.
Shortly after the year 2000, Pavel Kříž painted Sunday Afternoon. With this picture, moods, the atmosphere of a place and general daily feelings began to play a thought-provoking role. The instantaneous stimuli for the paintings are also associated with their thematic variety. As a consequence, this involved the definitive rejection and break-up of the universal binding construction of his works; the consequence of the defocusing of the compositional boundaries in his drawings and the nascency of emotional, lyrically expressive painting. The painter tested the various waters of style and changes the colour diction of the urban landscapes with a human element from case to case, sometimes diametrically. However, he always transferred the feelings and moods from daily time, the atmospheric state and the constellation of the place using water colours on paper and canvas in a relaxed manner and with a painter’s gusto.
Last year he created inspiration for his impressions artificially. This is based on contrasts of focus and the softness of form and line and he has continued in the destruction of reality. He acquires a distorted arbitrary moment from the reality of human life or the environment from a television screen using a camera and he then uses a computer to process the unfocused details via the optics of the eye. He thus feels and perceives the mediated figural reality as an abstraction, just as the historical ornaments on the walls used to fulfil a similar role.
From the beginning of his creative journey, Pavel Kříž has applied the principle which is the essence of the fine arts and involves the balance of the depicted reality – the degree of his stylisation and the decorative components of the work. He has given himself enough time in order to understand and verify these principles, meaning that the development of his work has taken place slowly and with certainty. He is one of the artists who have been liberated by sincere creative joy.
Jan Kapusta junior