Every action causes a reaction. An image, if it is meaningful, evokes a reaction. Color evokes a feeling; a combination of colors triggers a reaction in the viewer. Metaphor is an attribute of divine creation. Creation is a metaphor for God. Reality is irrational. A canvas for painting. A canvas for metaphor. A painting is a flower in the meadow of the world.

The idea of the Jesuit philosopher, Marinist poet, and rhetorician Emanuel Tesauro, dedicated to a response to the work of Galileo’s spirit, is a masterful, multi-layered play. The rehabilitation of contemporary painting is thus predestined. It is now solely up to the painter whether he has the ability to be original and personally uncompromising.

This exhibition works with a motif and with what lies beyond it. The domain of visual art is the complex, inexplicable magic of painting. Metaphors are used in the paintings, and these are not limited to a narrative level. It is a play of color and form. A motif that may not, in and of itself, possess the deepest logical significance can achieve it through its execution and the metaphorical interpretation of these parameters. After all, according to Emanuel—in my free metaphorical interpretation—metaphor is God’s joke, His “Greatness.”

The main body of Václav Rodek’s (*1976) work consists of classical painting that explores the phenomenon of color, composition, and the pictorial plane. The themes of individual paintings and series of paintings are linked to both nonverbal and verbal means of artistic expression. He explores narrative stories and their transposition, contextualization, and recycling. An important element is the abstraction of the painterly gesture and the conception of abstraction as an equal method of expression within the painting. He often oscillates between these phenomena, which leads to the development of his own painting philosophy. 

He often enriches classical painting with unconventional materials that, in their relationship to the “painted” element, convey the desired information. This information is polarized between the referential level of the material and its aesthetic value. For example, the paintings incorporate wood veneers, synthetic imitations of wood grain, wood stains, varnishes, oils, and waxes. The resulting composition becomes a pictorial hybrid.

The theme of the paintings is expressed both through classical pictorial schemes and through the use of juxtapositional, post-production, and reinterpretative constructions. The content is encoded through conceptual loops into neologisms that reference previous works. Within this visual rhizome, both series of paintings and works not bound by a series emerge.