petr kvíčala
1960, Svitavy, Česká republika
© Ondřej Polák
Petr Kvíčala is an artist who with great sensitivity perceives the possibilities of interconnection between an artwork and architecture or applied art.
This awareness and ability to trace in a particular architectural subject a possible connection with art is manifested in the exhibition conceived uniquely for Závodný Gallery in Mikulov. For this particular site-specific installation, Petr Kvíčala chose the gallery building itself, more precisely its white stone façade. Thus, during the period of the exhibition, the cladding of the building was livened up by lines and ornaments, inspired by the sgraffito decoration of Renaissance and Neo-Renaissance buildings.
Nevertheless, Petr Kvíčala's concept of sgraffito differs from its historical origins by an expressive dynamism, free repetition of individual motifs resulting in artist's unique style.
The colour scheme of most of the presented works is approaching the concept of monochrome painting. The exhibition is dominated by red and white-grey tones. The interaction between the colour and light creates the impression of great relief plasticity.
Petra Kvíčala's first artworks are associated with the landscape, in which he sought ideas for his drawings and paintings. Individual elements such as clusters of points, straight lines, elementary geometric formations or wavy lines are extracted from their natural context and lined up in a recurrent order on canvas. Thus, the first simplified records of the observed landscapes are created to become the base for the next systematic artwork creation. These archetypal landscape forms are integrated into structures reminding us of ornament - a visual medium that has been used since ancient times by various civilizations and human cultures.
The schematic sorting and repetition of individual ornamental elements appears also in various crafts /weaving, goldbeating.../. The beginning of the 20th century rejected the ornament as a system too decorative therefore inappropriate for modern art and architecture /A. Loos: Ornament and Crime, 1910/. Nevertheless, for Petr Kvíčala it remains a vital source of the most basic elements, which he systematically uses in various cycles.
The waves and the zig zag curves are inherently one of the distinctive marks of Petr Kvíčala's artwork. Sinusoids and lines symbolize the movement over time. The author is tirelessly exploring this theme in his cycles. Since the second half of the 1990s, Petr Kvíčala has been involved in many projects in architecture. These include, for example, interventions in the architecture of Ivan Koleček's flat, 1995, painting on the ceiling of the entrance hall of the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Reduta theatre in Brno, wall paintings for Rischart, Marienplatz, Munich, 2007 etc.
