Pavel Kryz
Passing face
Tomáš Pospiszyl, Reflex 1994
Prague artist Pavel Kříž in the Nová Síň Gallery
Passing face
An empty gallery is the most barren space we can imagine. There is a perfect nothingness in an empty gallery, only the deafening sound of emptiness and blinding light. Only the artist’s thoughts, paintings and statues finally bring shapes, colours and life. An empty gallery is a shell, a bubble, which distances the surrounding world from the world of the work of art and the artist. It has to be capable of enabling the artist to imprint his idea on it. A light mist is falling outside and the first umbrellas open. So far it is empty inside the Nová Síň Gallery. Perhaps painter Pavel Kříž has greater success abroad than in the Czech Republic, provided commercial success and the number of large exhibitions has any meaning at all in the world and art. When I first visited him in his studio, the two of us were cramped into a small room, with tens of paintings and drawings full of gentle lines of force and thirteen sets of faces of the half-forgotten Hollywood star of the nineteen-twenties, Gloria Swanson.
Forgotten stars
More than over a year ago, in his friend’s antique shop Pavel Kříž discovered a collection of period postcards of American film stars of the silent film era, which in there time represented today’s monograph of famous actors and actresses and supported a cult of individual stars, in the right sense of the word. Today, their names often say nothing even to film experts. We are not able to connect their faces to any films, or any life stories. However, what time has not managed to disguise even after seventy years is the aura of a star, the uniqueness of an already forgotten star. “When I received a date for the exhibition in the Nová Síň Gallery, I could fill it with paintings I had already completed. However, the large white walls inspired me to create an installation intended for this space, and no other.” Pavel Kříž admitted to a slightly untraditional inspiration: “Last but not least, the possibility and desire to use the gallery as an unusual studio also played a role in it.” Just as the original postcard had been reproduced into thousands of copies, Pavel Kříž wants to multiply photographic reproductions of the half-forgotten actress into huge canvases, stretching from the floor all the way to the ceiling filling out the gallery. The Hollywood star and her look, so unique, suddenly find themselves in the situation of the crucifixion of Christ, of which there are hundreds of reproductions in churches. How will the actress’ look change after it is repeated a hundred times? Will it say something more about her life, about her voluntary and perhaps involuntary poses? “In the end, the entire project took on the shape of nine sets of sixty-eight faces of Gloria Swanson, which are hung in three parts on the gallery walls. I covered pasted photographs with an ornamental over-paint.”
Three days in the gallery
Plans are becoming a reality. The first photograph is lying on the empty and white floor, and is being pasted into the final canvases measuring six-by-ten metres. Pavel Kříž has three days and three nights ahead of him to complete his work. The gallery is transformed into an operation room, the blinding and somewhat sterile white is interrupted only by the figure of the artist and his workers. The artist finally has a chance to see the work in process in its real size, in dimensions according to which he will execute the over-paint of the faces. The faces are pasted next to each other and their quantity creates a picture grid. Basically the actual installation of the exhibition could have theoretically been prepared in the studio, but now things are getting thick. It is not an easy task to attach a ten-metre paper canvas to the wall, pasted together from hundreds of parts. Not even the artist had an idea of how the faces will look next to each other in their final number. It may turn out that the final effect will be trivial. Perhaps it will not be possible to create a painting on the entire prepared surface for the reason being time. The photographs cover the floor like a carpet. The artist is holding a bucket with blue paint, while standing amidst faces like in the sea. The ornaments are thickening, the level is unsettled. The ornaments are gently rippling above thousands of faces like waves in the sea above the face of a drowned victim.
Mission
The face that has been repeated a thousand times of the now nameless Hollywood star, captured by an unknown and most probably no longer living photographer, mechanically and without back-talk, printed by an anonymous printing machine, tells a story of our century. Everything that happened is only a pose, a studio arranged shot, which managed to entirely empty itself over the course of the years. We place our own ideas into it, which are left with nothing more than that differing from the facts, from the truth. How many times have we already seen similar breakdowns of faces, walls full of the names of victims of concentration camps, hundreds, thousands, millions of various faces, various fates and stories. All of them blend into one, and only one, and can be replaced by only one face. Pavel Kříž never tried to precisely find out the fate of actress Gloria Swanson. It is not even important for his work. What is important is her look, her fate as an artificially created Hollywood idol, the principle of a star, a reproduced deity, or myth under a magnifying glass.
Tomáš Pospiszyl
PS. Gloria Swanson belonged among the queens of Hollywood cinema of the nineteen-twenties. She began as one of the legendary “bathing beauties” of Mack Sennet. Then she played in Charlie Chaplin films. In the first half of the twentieth century she created numerous film roles, in which she externalised the ideal modern emancipated woman. She starred as an aging actress in the film Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson passed away in 1983 at the age of eighty-six. In 1975, she played in the popular catastrophic film Airport.