CONTEMPLATION OF LIGHT
Jiří Matějů´s paitings are visual metaphors. Naturally, this does not tell much. Above all, metaphor is related to literature, and therefore it is necessary to comment on it further. Classical poetics describes a metaphor as a means that transfers a word from a place where it is usually used to a place where a word is missing. It is a naming of something that does not have its own naming. Something analogical could also be found in the field of perception: the thing we do not see is what is not present in the visible world, however, not because it would not presently be there. It is not possible to see it directly; it is necessary to perceive it indirectly, metaphorically. This is what characterizes, most aptly, Jiří Matějů´s paintings.
Briefly said, in his paintings the colour becomes a metaphor of light. The difference from verbal metaphor consists in the fact that light has its own name, however, it itself is not visible – thanks to light we see objects entering visual presence, we see them only in the light. Jiří Matějů´s metaphorical paintings also go through a paradox, as if crosswise; they are not in direct visualization of the nonvisible, but its contemplation. Above all, this effect is reached quite easily by objectless, non-figurative, colourful compositions. The colour does not serve to distinguish; the colour is itself and in the composition of the painting it forms itself – it is seen as a colour, nothing more than colour. And in this sense colour is a goal of contemplation, which is nothing other than an absorption into questioning. Why do I see the colour? Because of the light; however, it is not an answer; it is a contemplation of an answer, a contemplation of light. Making a presence of absence and the present absent.
According to a legend Wassily Kandinsky saw Monet´s Haycocks in 1869 on an exhibition in Moscow. He related this experience to what he read about Niels Bohr´s quantam physics: physical reality does not have any substance, nor tactile reality; there are only jumps of energy quantum, reality is dispersed into virtual particles, in the grounds of the material there is something immaterial. It is passed on that it was Kandinsky who asked the question, if an object is destroyed what replaces it?
Jiří Matějů answers by his paintings. Light and colour in such a composition by cancelling the contrast between background and foreground, exterior, and interior, because it is a pure space of harmony between the visible and the nonvisible taking place between colour and light. Contemplating these paintings, it is the question laid out in front of us, we can perceive, what is earlier than the visible and recognizable world, which is in fact immaterial, energetic, a colourful texture of light for which our sight have always been woven.
Visual metaphor: one in the other, nameless in name, absently present.
It is important not to miss the fact that Jiřího Matějů´s paintings, even though they seem to be geometric and structurally static at first sight, they are extremely dynamic. They are not only visual metaphors, but what more, they are the movement of metaphorization, they transfer colour from place to place, typical of the colour, to the place where it is diffused and absorbed by light and it is regarded to be the real carrier.
Light is not scattered into colours; scheme of colours always refers to ephemeral (and thus various, diverse) moments in which we realize that our proper names name something that is not typical of them. And there we realized that when seeing we do not see anything.
Miroslav Petříček
