Pavla Malinová & Pavel Dvořák: Bullying Eyes, Wheel Spins and Flies

NoD Gallery
Pavla Malinová & Pavel Dvořák: Bullying Eyes, Wheel Spins and Flies
Curator: Jiří Machalický
April 27 - May 26, 2017

This exhibition features works by two painters who have known each other since the time of their studies at the Ostrava University, and who have been close for many years now – not just personally, but also as regards their approaches to painting, characterized by sensitive reflection of the world around us, with its rapidly changing environment and lifestyles, taking in the fluidity of the system of values to which society is committed and of the developments which shape it. All this said, it should be noted that each of these two artists has evolved a distinctive idiom of their own, a typical handwriting discernible at first sight. Thus each has arrived at a thoroughly individual philosophy and an inimitable perspective of contemporary reality.

Pavla Malinová has developed a style of her own, drawing on the legacy of certain avant-garde art movements of the 20th century. Above all, however, she reacts to the goings-on shaping present-day reality. Her paintings attest to a finely honed feeling for correlations between colours, and for throwing into due relief relevant elements while making them fit organically in the overall compositional concept. She puts to use her abundant imagination, coupled with an appealing dose of playfulness and sense of light irony. She occasionally chooses to lay emphasis on details, upgrading them to the status of key motifs. Elsewhere, she may venture into the realm of pure abstraction yet remains ever mindful of keeping in constant touch with reality as her starting point. She intertwines freedom of expression with meticulously precise draughtsmanship, thereby achieving an unusual degree of suspense. More often than not she complements her inclination towards the monumental by devices whose attention to detail borders on miniaturist treatment. Her expression can at times seem robust yet can just as easily shift to refinement and delicacy. The impact of her paintings consists in their repertory of contrasts and intersections between dream and reality. She works with complex structures or ornaments which could actually be seen as compositions in their own right, but which she often juxtaposes with figure motifs. She likes to employ a wide variety of symbols, and draws on her reservoir of wordplay and charmingly witty puns in devising titles for her pictures. Her output betrays a sense for spotting the grotesqueness of various situations or processes encountered in our everyday life.

Pavel Dvořák´s creative idiom is broad-minded, with an emphasis on condensed, elliptical treatment which still underpins his paintings´ intrinsic nod to absurdity. He is a continuator of the grotesque tendencies in Czech art which have evolved in successive waves over the last few decades. He tackles his themes with an express penchant for hyperbole. While paring down pictorial form to the utmost simplicity, he manages to do so without in the least detracting from his painting´s wealth of expression. Indeed, he still enhances its suggestive power by opting for the use of deformation, at times fairly coarse. The stories outlined in his pictures are readily accessible, needing no further interpretation. The artist renders a graphic account of content to which he subordinates form. He is not in the least concerned with any sort of an aesthetic gameplay; rather, he aims at bringing across unambiguous and succinct messages. In their turn though, these come up with several alternative readings, contingent on current developments in contemporary society and in human relations. Products of Pavel Dvořák´s work in his other medium, that of drawing, document the way he develops his themes and ideas. Finally, he also creates wooden objects in which he materializes his vision of the world in threedimensional forms imbued with the same sense of irony and black humour as his painting.