For the painter, Petr Pastrňák, there are no stable values in his work. In each of his painting painted on either canvas or paper, he tries his possibilities and opens to new expectations. Naturally, he has his experience; after all, he already became famous in the middle of nineties on the Czech art scene. He has his methods, technology, way of paiting and his unique style that is changing naturally and fluently. All this represents the basis for the painter´s self-confidence and it motivates his public´s and collectors´ expectations. Nevertheless, no one, neither the painter himself knows what it will happen in his next painting.
After the forests on fire and dark strips of industrial towns and factories presented during the first two months of this year in the prestigious Václav Špála´s Gallery on the Prague´ s National Street, the Prinz Prager Gallery introduces new collection of paintings called after the most abstract painting – Storm. Extreme spree of elements naturally develops in the landscape Pastrňák´s visual contemplation about his new possible visualization, and interest in the extreme processes gone on inside.He has already shown this in his forests on fire. It also represents a metaphor of his feeling of world, sensitive record of painter´s fears, whose painting closely connects to his physical and psychical state and of the world where he works.
Undoubtly, Pastrňák always thinks of finding other new impulses for his paintings, of moving his own aesthetics, working with coincidence and his own readiness, and of constructing his own paintings repeatedly in a different style knowing well that he can´t get around him. He loves forests and landscape and therefore he keeps painting them, searching so for himself and for them other potential of their possibilities. It is not only about an extensive and painterly grateful or fancy storm, which he would reach through his gestic expression anyway, but also about a meaningful and emotions full emptying of sylvan painterly aesthetics to the extremes of “bad painting” that is beautiful due to its newness. Certain austerity of instruments and colors
contrasts with the spontaneity of more frenetic themes, however, it represents complementary singularity of Pastrňák´s expression. Moreover, there is a lot of vernal colorful lushness and visual attractiveness of the forests in which the painter is wandering to catch, by his impressive gesture, maybe according to the impressionists, his painterly contemplative impression. Pastrňák often visits southern India. Staying there fulls him by a liberating feeling – he is, works in the garden, and sketches. I think he may have left a bit of the feeling in the painting while painting local holy mountain.
For Petr Pastrňák painting is a kind of his mental and physical existence. In paintings, he synthesizes experience of Western painting including the admiration to various landscape painters, effective knowledge of Eastern philosophy, Eastern-Asian art and desire to penetrate and discover structures of things that surround us, comply with us and tempt us. Strenuosity and contemplative activity together with cognition found Pastrňák´s exceptional painting, his inactivity and storm of forests, belief and emptiness of colors, reality, which changes into paintings where you can fall so uniquely. Finally, we do not have to know, how.
Martin Dostál
The exhibition is under the patronage of Mgr. Lukáš Kaucký, the Councillor for Culture Municipality Prague.
