Series: For Your Eyes Only

The difference between the background and the figure was blurred, the paintings had the air of a randomly produced work while exhibiting an impulpable sense of orderly arrangement and repetition. The suggested relationship with op-art may raise the following questions: Are the works by Petr Kvíčala a continuation of the line stemming from 1960’s modernism? How can we come to terms with the fact that for over two decades he has been exploring a narrowly delineated method of painting which, while permanently varied, in principle is continuously repeated?

Kvíčala’s work evinces the logic of development, an orderly inner arrangement and clear rules of execution. Although this is impossible to see in his current output, Petr Kvíčala has been profoundly influenced by his affinity with nature. His beginnings were punctuated by attempts to express nature’s principles using the medium of visual art but in the second half of the 1980’s the artistic means employed became extremely unorthodox. His creative aspirations from that period were typified by the limitless merging of various disciplines: he created texts inspired by what he had experienced in the landscape and drew simple sketches of fields. At the same time, he was a member of several ensembles dabbling in minimalist music and musique concrète whose productions crossed the boundary between theatrical performance and animated sculptural installations. Just as a musical composition develops with time, so his visual output from that period revealed an effort to investigate the phenomena of transformation and time. It can in fact be approached as graphic sheet music for the events in nature through which he hoped to capture the continual repetition and rhythm of natural processes. An abstraction of these principles, using the medium of visual art, gelled into an original variant of ornamental art which he later adopted as the staple theme of his work. Occasionally, the ornaments are informed by, without being derivative of, historical or folk patterns used as pure inspiration. The orderly inner arrangement of Kvíčala’s work is determined by employing lines approached as ornaments. Of these, the undulating line – a rhythmic painterly gesture in time –is featured most often. The lines are combined and composed according to clear pre-determined rules or algorithms which nevertheless may produce unexpected results.
At the turn of the 1980’s and 1990’s, Petr Kvíčala’s work seemed to display an affinity with the broad stream of post-modernist Czech painting as hinted at by the clear colours of his paintings, which enclosed colour surfaces within boundaries and used archetypal-geometric elements. Today, such a general classification is less justifiable.
Obviously, rather than making post-modernist quotations and providing a symbolic content to the paintings, so characteristic for the painters from the circle of the Tvrdohlaví group, Kvíčala was more interested in probing the possibilities of the painting medium itself.
The strict order that Kvíčala consistently adheres to seems to contradict the call for artistic freedom and creativity and the aspirations of modern art to permanently push back the boundary. In brief, Kvíčala does not offer unending novelties that would disregard artistic tradition and the previous phases of his work, but instead he offers perpetual repetition and variation. Although it might not be obvious at first glance, repetition is one of the fundamental principles of modern art.
The history of twentieth century avant-garde art abounds with artists trying to liberate art from the yoke of the existing rules, simultaneously conceiving new sets of rules, often more restrictive than the preceding ones. Once the artists had shattered their fetters they immediately started inventing manacles even more sophisticated, rendering any movement impossible. Kvíčala’s ordered lines of ornaments produce an effect similar to the grid, a concept which helped many modernist artists reduce visual art to its original foundation, its elementary level. Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt or Agnes Martin used the grid to create a non-hierarchical pictorial surface without reference to traditional methods of depiction. The painting was thus brought back to “square one” which is also perceivable in Kvíčala’s ornaments, often compared to prehistoric or primitive art. Rosalind Krauss noticed that, for visual artists, the grid is a means of suppressing the traditional vocabulary of painting, although it is bound to lead them to repetition which seems to be contradictory to the trend of modern art to come up with something new every time. “But in saying that the grid condemns these artists not to originality but to repetition, I am not suggesting a negative description of their work. I am trying instead to focus on a pair of terms – originality and repetition – and to look at their coupling without prejudice; for in the instance we are examining, these two terms seem bound together in a kind of aesthetic economy, interdependent and mutually sustaining, although the one – originality – is the valorized term and the other – repetition or copy or reduplication – is discredited.”2 Krauss concludes that originality and repetition are closely related, are mutually inseparable and, if looked upon without prejudice, are of the same value and importance for twentieth-century art.