The exhibition Records – Paraphrases presents two approaches to the work of painter Pavel Hayek. In his work, the artist uses acrylic spray paint on canvas to capture a wide range of plant fragments, exploring the shapes of natural materials and geometric elements, and examining the possibilities of their structures. Hayek explores the relationship between the form of a natural object and the blank canvas, the polarity between positive and negative, between black and white. He reduces the perceived natural forms to two-dimensional black-and-white outlines. By translating them into black and white, he extracts them and transforms them into abstract symbols, thus moving on the boundary between the non-representational and the representational. He does not paint structures spatially; rhythm is dictated by gaps, and he thus dematerializes natural fragments into immaterial, austere systems. 

The second part of the exhibition explores Hayek’s paraphrases of 17th-century Dutch masters and 19th-century landscape painters. The artist draws, for example, on the landscape paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the classical photographs of Rudolf Koppitz, whose compositions he appropriates, reduces, and reinterprets. 

Pavel Hayek (*1959) is an artist who studied fine arts at the Jaroslav Kvapil People’s School of Art in Brno under Petr Skácel. He originally trained as a tailor and worked for over 20 years in the exhibition department of the House of Art in Brno, where Zdeněk Sýkora’s works were exhibited in 1988. The exhibition had a profound influence on Hayek; he began painting himself in the 1990s. In addition to Zdeněk Sýkora’s geometric structures, the artist’s work was also greatly influenced by Vladislav Mirvald’s multiplications of elementary shapes, the mutual contrasts in the form of diptychs by Jan Kubíček, and the technological experiments of Dalibor Chatrný. Hayek worked with photograms, silkscreen prints, and acrylic and oil painting. He now paints primarily with acrylics or acrylic spray paint. He captures the structures of natural objects, depicting the branches of shrubs and trees, fruits, seeds, or leaves in black-and-white binary form. He places particular emphasis on the form of the work. From 1990 to 2001, he was a member of the TT Club of Visual Artists and Theorists; since 1998, he has been a member of the Concrete Artists’ Club. He lives and works in Brno. He regularly exhibits in galleries in the Czech Republic and abroad. The artist’s works are part of the collections of the National Gallery in Prague, the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Foundation for Contemporary Art in Prague, and others.