Pavel Příkaský

Pavel Příkaský studied painting at the Academy of Fine Art in Prague, and though he still works with this medium, he blurs and obscures its boundaries using photography, fragments, series and installations. When working with photographs he is interested in the defects that this “perfect” instrument of depiction suffers. Recurring motifs are disappearance, fuzziness and over-exposure, colour deflection and the overlapping of individual images that takes place if light-sensitive paper is exposed several times to another negative. However, the artist less interested in the properties of photography but more in the saturation of the world by the photography image and film and says of his approach that it is more intuitive and independent on the surrounding reality.

The fragment finds its way into Příkaský’s paintings often in connection with work in a specific environment that implies discontinuity. One of these environments would be the Trafačka Gallery, where in the installation Nižší napětí / Low Voltage, 2014 he combined the flaky wall with the austere font of Times New Roman. He took a similar approach in the exhibition Najdeš ji v levém uchu / Look in Your Left Ear at the Mimochodem Gallery (2014). Here, however, an important role was played by the environment of the vestibule of what had been a precisely designed metro station. Příkaský drew on this historical reference to reveal the fictive remains of murals. It is clear that the fragments of paintings by the artist refer to the work of the memory and the operation of recollections. A possible historical parallel, especially as regards the more densely painted works in which the artist uses the entire surface of the canvas, could be the artificialism of Štýrský and Toyen. However, unlike these artists Příkaský works with far more real and realistically depicted objects.

Příkaský has recently been working on installations and video installations with Miroslava Večeřová (Díl první: Jazyk Krajiny / Part One: Language of the Landscape, 2013 and Dvojité dno / Double Bottom, 2014 and Díl druhý: Umělé dýchání / Part Two: Artificial Breathing, 2014). Here too the question of the possibility of representation remains important. The paradox of this endeavour to represent objects is captured by Jean-Francois Lyotard in Notes on the Return and other essays, in which he says that the object that we observe for too long escapes us and disappears. The portrayal of several objects that Příkaský selects for his series of pictures disappears in a similar fashion.

2014

Radek Wohlmuth: Večeřová s Příkaským na výstavě dávají umělé dýchání umění, Hospodářské noviny: http://archiv.ihned.cz/c1-63312430-vecerova-prikasky-karlin

Radek Wohlmuth: Pavel Příkaský (portfolio): http://artcasopis.cz/clanky/pavel-prikasky