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Searching for a uniting platform / Ideal unity somewhere in the interspace

Juraj Kollar (1981) ranks among the significant young painters of both the Slovak and the Czech provenience. In his work he moves between two polarities – sensual and rational approach to the picture. If at the beginning he had entered the sphere of painting more or less intuitively, now he is more and more confident that he needs to master above all the means of expression and through them open the way to the secret that contains inside the term “portrayal”.

The early paintings by Juraj Kollar, full of student’s keenness, demonstrate author’s passion for perfect form. The painter’s illusion serves only as a means of magic to imprint the depicted topic, namely portraits and still life. While the workmanshift deepens the exact drawing detail, there is a collision in another level. How to interconnect the master’s illusive description of the selected object or figure with the surrounding? How to interconnect the figure with its

framework? How to create a perfect whole and not only a perfect fragment? The way in this direction, i.e. to the interconnection of the object and the background, is indicated by various stages of “entries into illusion” in portrayals. A key work of this period is a small painting called Chlapec (A Boy, 2001). There the author starts from the background to the first plan. Figures step out of the background area and separate from it subsequently. Two possible procedures of depiction were applied there – modelling the figure in the colour of the background or in a contract local colour. The first procedure points to free interpretation, the other one to a more realistic description.

In the next stage, Kollar leaves the figure and the related drawing detail. He is fully engaged in a research of his own “scope” of the picture. He learns the status quo – amorphousness of a space that cannot be successfully reconstructed in a painting. The author strives for a purely artistic definition of what we could call a space. The landscape has always been a perfect study material for its understanding and painter’s deconstruction. Kollar creates impressivev studies and investigates the principles of relationships between the light and colour intensity both in a landscape composition as well as in a detailed cut. In the landscape model he starts from its basic segmentation – horizons that attract observer’s orientation. The relationship of the horizon with the illusion of space is further subjected to an optic analysis in transparent colouring as well as in modelling by colour pastes. He is interested in calm settings of horizontal landscape structure as well as in expressive dynamized settings full of vital vegetation. The relationship between the calm and restlessness is expressed by visual means and through this abstracting, Kollar finds the atmosphere of what is depicted. Kollar arrives to the abstract expression through intensive visual perception.

In connection with impressive analyses of concrete frameworks, kollar discovers his own abstract stains that release painting plans for human eye. The drawing is created by contact surface (edging), colours flowing together or a raster. The drawing detail is not built alone but created as a harmony of larger pieces. What is authoritative is the various intensity of colour and neutral surfaces, similarly as their size, shape or density of the applied colour (transparency, materialization, colour substance). The white surface works as a temporary unifying platform that provides space for calm meeting of stains or restless running of gestic strokes. In his free search for expression, Kollar expands his repertoire of means of modelling. He puts strings, cut parts of linen and wires into the context of the painting. He again perpetualizes the abstracted landscapes by assembly elements and puts them back into the world of material objects.

A significant set of his works is Konstrukce (Constructions). Kollar works here with the conceptual theme of a loophole. He chooses a regular rectangular outline as the pre-selected rational construct that defines and segments the scope of the picture. He creates a certain curtain that filters “something from the landscape”. This “something” is captivated by human eye and evaluated as painter’s composition where each box of the rectangular network works at the same time as an independent window of the painting. It gives rise to a structure and a variable. The chain of compositions creates a whole and thus a raster picture. The work Tovarna (Factory, 2006) uses various intensity and permeability of individual boxes of the large segmented window. The situation enables changing various modelling and painting strategies, namely putting various depicting and abstracted figures beside each other. The tension between the depiction and the abstraction is actually given by the filter of visual experience where an important role is played by the curtains and length axes situated in relation to the observer. There is a difference between the immediate recording and long exposition. The painting Květy (Blossoms, 2007) represents a “loophole” realized through an embossed panel window. We are inside and we are looking out. Not entirely, only “according to the possibilities”. In this specific case, Collar’s loopholes through glass blocks are significant. “A look-out according to the possibilities” is the author’s original symbolic platform that can be theoretically described. The painting is divided into structural rasters in look-out and fill-out (framework) parts. Their density influences the perception of the depicted theme. It leads to explanations of principles of seeing, perception and realization of visual impulses for human mind.

What follows is so far the latest set of works of art where the author returned to the picture as a single, independent and peculiar window. To one of the loopholes and his newly acquired and proven possibilities. Thanks to the previous experience, Kollar acquired a greater sensitivity towards light situations and colour nuances. He can see more clearly. He is interested in colourfulness and variability of light situations whose real number somehow depends on the possibility of analogical projection of the infinity. For instance, we can see music connotations related to the free self-realization of a human spirit. This is the bridge that connects the depiction and abstraction, theme and range of the message, a figure and a place. If we focus on the phenomenal fact in detail, we find out that in this concentrated view, it escapes again to the sphere of abstraction. Human mind synthesises facts and identifies with what is seen somewhere on the way between those two polarities. In the interspace of ideal unity.

Petr Vaňous, Prague – Kosire 24th February 2009