Exhibition:Line, Colour, Rhythm, National Gallery, Prague, 2002

Kvíčala’s approach, i.e. his consistent conceptualization of painting, without which he would never have been able to continue in his cultivation of one single principle, is rather atypical in the Czech context.3 It is a lucky symbiosis in which he produces paintings that are at the same time rational and also work with the public, while promoting the legacy of the modernist painting of the second half of the 20th century. His work represents both conceptualism and “pure” visual qualities.
Kvíčala’s manner of painting has lately been attaining a more and more painterly style, aestheticism and sensual features.
The last of his thus far exhibited series of paintings – shown first in Berlin and now also in Prague – fascinated the eye, especially given the large size of the pieces, serving only to emphasize its sensory power.
Similarly to the previous process paintings, this set is also sensual and spectacular (in a good sense). These paintings are hardly just some kind of graphic diagram or chart created by a mere mechanical expansion of motifs whose concepts had already been completely worked out on a sheet of paper taken from a note pad. The precisely chosen size of these paintings and their final execution in color are the key factors in the resulting effect. Both the viewer’s eyes and body are confronted with a ratio, the material and the size of the individual paintings. The observer relates to them as to some kind of two-dimensional architecture, as to minimalist objects.

II
“Does the ornament have a history?” was the rhetorical question asked by Alois Riegl more than a hundred years ago in his book Problems of Style. The impetus for this book came from (a) his study of ancient ornaments conducted over many years, and (b) – even more importantly – from his polemic with the architect and art historian Gottfried Semper and his students. The latter group derived the shape of historical ornaments from the materials and technology used in the process of their creation. In their opinion, for example, the manner of weaving and the threads used played the main role in the final look
of the concrete textile ornament. Unlike them, Alois Riegl claimed that the ornament develops according to its own logic, i.e. that it has a history independent of the material and/or technology. In his view, the ornament was not primarily predestined by the technological processes of ancient man, but rather by a fondness for evenly organized lines and their own artistic will. This would necessarily lead to the conclusion that the ornament, like the whole of fine arts, has its own individual laws
of progress and therefore also its own history.
During the 19th century and more so at the beginning of the 20th century, the ornament was placed at the center of research of fine arts methodology, for it was perceived as a basic element of fine art. Art scientists believed that once they understood its essence and development, they would discover a way to understand all art, similar to the way the splitting of the atom could throw light on the secrets of matter. The origin of the ornament and the origin of fine art were seen to be located in immediate mutual proximity; the ornament representing the outcome of an instinctive force, which lies behind the original impulse for creating art.
The ornament played a similarly important role even in the development of the then evolving modern art: It was understood as a demonstration of primitivism, being the exemplary product of the “natural artist”. Archeological findings of the time proved that the ornament really is one of among the oldest manifestations of art; it definitely existed in the Paleolithic era and occurred in virtually every subsequent historical period.
At the same time, however, its geometric laws, as well as its abstract nature, put the ornament in the most current context of up-to-date art of the beginning of the 20th century. We may safely say that the ornament has been the abstracted experience of anti-academism, and/or the expression of a protest against classic European painting from the Renaissance to today.
Petr Kvíčala, today, is also perceived as an artist producing some sort of ‘pre-paintings’, as the type of creator of art who attempts to reach the essence of the creative process.
Gauguin’s journeys to the Pacific or Picasso’s interpretations of African masks were by no means a retrograde or reactionary view taken against the flow of the art stream; no, they were primarily courageous attempts made towards locating the foundations of artistic language as well as identifying new original ways forwards. A hundred-year-old polemic about the possibility of the ornament having its own historical development seems to have a very clear outcome in Petr Kvíčala’s paintings. Even an unvarying and perpetual ornament is nothing more than history in movement, the constantly changing stream of change stemming from the logic of the ornament as such.