In the last two years I have been concentrating on a larger series of paintings on canvas, executed exclusively in oil.

I have tried to keep the paintings in tension - so that the form is constantly transformed in the very act of its creation and remains autonomous even as it immediately reveals its own rhythm, mass and dynamics. Not as a descriptive narrative, or any narrative, but as an experience. The painting was created by layering, by touching, quite intuitively, without any preconceived templates. Thus, the paintings always gradually emerged for me from an unpredictable gesture. Often it was also an unselfconscious, unequal struggle, full of uncertainty, doubt and anger, yet wonderful.

The autonomy of painting was not that it "depicted something" but became an event itself - a direct, irreplaceable expression of seeing and feeling, realized by its own means. 

Color was not a vehicle of meaning, but meaning itself. The intensity of radiance was not an effect but an energy that kept the image present. The mass thus created a body in which the painting became real.

This process, however, did not imply a closedness or self-centeredness ("painting for painting's sake"), but a radical authenticity of expression that did not rely on pre-given content but created it. Painting here is a language that does not explain but makes present - and it is in this unmistakability that its power lies.

In this sense, I saw the autonomy of painting as the essential independence of the image, not merely as an aesthetic category. The image did not appear to be a secondary carrier of meaning, but a primary manifestation of being in sensuous form. It did not emerge as a translation of thought into visible form, but as a transformation in which meaning was born simultaneously with its material realization.

For autonomous painting operates on the plane of preconceptual experience, where color, texture, and luminous qualities are not signs of something else, but of intensity itself. In this respect, painting approaches the realm of experience rather than representation: it operates immediately, before it is captured by interpretation.

It is a knowledge that happens not through concepts, but through intense presence - through what shows itself without allowing itself to be fully explained.

text: Jiří David

curator: Jiří Fajt