Pavel Hayek

Pavel Hayek was born in 1959 in Brno, where he still lives. He attended private art school. His black-and-white work is instantly recognisable. He very often works with structures of natural elements such as seeds, fruit, leaves, or the branches of bushes and trees.

Hayek takes a rational approach to his art. He works systematically with individual elements and their sequential classification. Since the end of the 1980s he has been working on graphic design cycles that are to a certain extent echoes of Morandi’s still lifes. However, perhaps his opus 1 is the picture Česneky / Garlic, created in summer 1990, in which he uses natural motifs for the first time. And in 1991 he began to experiment with paintings resulting in reductive images in black and white.

“These were structures created by the contours of fruit that cover the entire surface of the picture. The method of depiction, in which the form is simply a contour, the subject is lacking or is left out, is similar to a photogram. After two years of painting black-and-white pictures I asked a photographer to create a photogram of several cumin seeds. The result so took my breath away that I borrowed some equipment and began making photograms of different natural phenomena, from seeds, leaves, branches and different types of grass, to sand and crystalline sugar. The record left by the photogram is more precise and the moment of surprise is larger than in pictures,” says Hayek. What results are structures formed by disassembling the surface of the picture from minor natural elements.

The black-and-white coloured glass and repeated composition of individual elements conjure up an op-art effect. Hayek’s work is close to structural painting and could be classified along with the reductive and constructivist tendencies of the type we know from Zdeněk Sýkora’s work, influential during the 1960s. Sýkora’s paintings are formed through the repetitive arrangement of many simple identical geometric elements, organised according to specific rules of combination. Hayek in his own way is influenced by this method, though uses his own version. He does not work with geometric forms but with the natural motifs referred to. He also works with a structure “that is not simply an aesthetic and intellectual experience, but is created by virtue of the many relationships between the compositional possibilities of the structure and its articulation from formations painted impersonally though capable of individual morphological characterisation.” (Jiří Valoch).

Hayek’s structures are subject to only one rule. They may be formed only by black or white surfaces. This has given rise to the impression that we are dealing with either the positive or the negative. However, the transition from positive to negative not only undermines the painted forms but expands the possibilities of perception. Hayek’s painting provokes ambiguity. Is what we are looking at a black painting on a white canvas (pears, peppers, parsley, horse-radish, butterbur leaves) or is it simply the chaos of irregular and unidentifiable white surfaces on a black background (or black surfaces on a white background)? Both interpretations are correct, as in the obverse and its reverse. Hayek’s works are both concrete and abstract at the same time.

Art in architecture:

www.pavelhayek.wz.cz/main.htm

Fišer, Zbyněk: Časy a pohyby Pavla Hayeka, A2 kulturní týdeník, 8/ 2006, s. 8

Pavel Hayek, Obrazy, Galerie Jiřího Jílka, Šumperk, 2009

3 x Brno (Veselý, Hayek, Medek), Galerie města Plzně, 2008

Pavel Hayek: Bestiář a herbář, Galerie Ad astra, Kuřim, 2008

Pavel Hayek, Přírodně, Galerie Ad astra, Kuřim, 2006

Pavel Hayek 1990-2003, Galerie ARS, Brno 2004

Pavel Hayek, Výstavní síň Sokolská 26, Ostrava, 1999

Pavel Hayek - Jan Kubíček, Galerie Aspekt, 1998

Pavel Hayek - Jiří Šigut, Galerie na bidýlku, Brno, 1998

Pavel Hayek, Galerei Emila Filly, Ústí nad Labem, 1996

Pavel Hayek, Struktury, Galerie Jaroslava Krále, Dům umění města Brna, 1993