Břetislav Malý

A feeling of responsibility to tradition often impedes artists when deciding how to treat painting and its fundamental and secondary components. It was only modernist self-confidence that began to accentuate autonomy, and this evolved into an era of reductive painterly abstract approaches that eliminated the contextual overlaps in favour of a romanticising spirituality. Painterly autonomy was given additional support during the era of the (post)conceptual interrogation of the determinants of the visual itself.

A cursory look at the paintings of Břetislav Malý would lead many viewers to conclude that they are dealing with one of the many methods of abstract painting that stand on the boundary of lyrical and structural abstraction and a painterly style thematising minimalist starting points spiced up with optical illusion. None of this is true. What Břetislav Malý is concerned with is above all an investigation into painting itself, or rather its most important component, i.e. colour, the way it is processed, variants of its layering and application, and its mutual interaction within the framework of each colour itself and their layered relationships. Břetislav Malý considers painting without having to resort to verbal interpretation. In other words, he interrogates colour by means of colour without having to articulate this interrogation in words.

This tautological way of thinking about the chosen subject matter forms one of the important strands in the philosophy of language. It should therefore not surprise us to discover how often Malý refers to the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his Remarks on Colour regards colours as phenomena related to speech. Wittgenstein looks at how we think about colours when we speak of them, and how this speech is significant in respect of how we in turn perceive them. The problematisation of the (non)loss-making semantic and contentual transfer between the medium of the painting on the one hand, and the world of the text or speech on the other, is once more explored in the work of Malý, but differently than it was in the era of conceptual research in the sphere of analytical philosophy. This new approach enables him to cut in two the seemingly inseparable, and he releases the word and the image from their traditional dependence. In his paintings there is no repetition of a rational, analytic description of the utilisation and reflection of colour in speech or vice versa. Above all, he conducts research that does not need or demand an interpreting transformation into another semiotic system. His paintings seem to confirm the words of Wittgenstein himself: “That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.”

For this reason, the perception of his paintings does not require anything more than a receptive and contemplative eye, whose task is to investigate the surfaces of the canvas and “bury” the coloured residuals of the underlying surfaces or the way the individual layers are placed on each other. Or else to examine their impasto spread, the subtle transitions between the tones selected and the deconstruction of the orthogonal spread of the image. The artist’s painterly, analytical considerations are strictly delineated from the expectations associated with the traditional narratival and mimetic function of painting. On the other hand, the binding logocentric imbalance between word and image is eliminated and the image declaratively and logically situates itself in place of the word. That which colour is and remains in Malý’s paintings is above all its very facticity, to the point at which one might wish to emphasise that colour is colour is colour. Always the same and itself. And yet other every time, an other by virtue of the multiplying and transforming relationships and ephemeral links between the local and the dominant colour scheme, as well as between different methods of its tractation.