Jiří Bartůněk takes a conceptual approach to artistic creation, but expresses himself primarily through the medium of painting on the surface of a classical hanging picture. He often uses a principle typical of so-called “critical postmodernism”, namely, the appropriation of iconically known, but also specifically Czech contemporary artworks, in which he searches for and depicts the structures and relationships between “high” and “low” art and explores the limits of pictorial expression. In addition to his own creative work, his position as lecturer at the Department of Art Education in Ústí nad Labem, which has spawned an entire generation of Czech artists who transcend the regional character, is crucial.
Bartůněk began to work freely in the 1980s, and only in figurative representation. During this period, the influence of the paintings of Josef Jíra, as well as Francis Bacon, is evident. His work features undeniably painterly values such as the dramatic nature of the manuscript, rich colours ranging from Baroque glazes through pastoral painting, and abrupt bursts of light and sudden darkness. Several spatial planes are often depicted in the compositions. Bartůňek’s work encompasses multiple layers, underpinned by intellectual and emotional constructs, and is complex in meaning. Its subject matter involves mainly personal stories, which are used to express the overall atmosphere of the time. This is one of the reasons why some theorists and curators classify his work as belonging to tendencies adjacent to the “Czech grotesque”.
Just after the Velvet Revolution, the artist ironically comments on contemporary themes, while finding in them fundamental existential motifs. This is evident, for example, in the paintings Cesta za slávou / Journey to Glory, Blažené otroctví / Blissful Slavery or Pokosený a nepokosený / Mowed and Unmown. Even his formal expression has changed considerably. Instead of the classical canvas, he began to use unconventional materials – carpets, furniture, and especially fibreboard – on which he began to intervene in a graphic way by scraping away and revealing the fibreboard layer in its pure form. In the 1980s, Bartůněk was barely present on the art scene. This was probably related to his moral attitude towards the regime’s cultural policy. Furthermore, since he had not graduated from an art college, he could not become a member of the SČVU (Union of Czech Visual Artists) and was not registered with the ČFVU (Czech Fine Arts Fund), and so was only permitted to exhibit in unofficial spaces. He had only four solo exhibitions during the entire period of normalisation.
Although his work from the 1980s and early 1990s is characterised by its painterly quality, Bartůněk himself stated that he did not want to become stuck in “auteurial handwriting” and further refinements of his style. The form and content of his works thus changed fundamentally in the post-revolutionary period. Following the modernist line and so-called tame modernism, under the influence of a fascination with postmodern literature (Vonnegut, Burroughs, Kundera, Bernhard) and literary distance, he began to exhibit neo-conceptual tendencies. He was fascinated by a rational, even cold approach to creation, the exact opposite of his previous neo-expressive position. Within this painterly milieu, he capitalised on the thirty years of experience he had gained as a graphic designer and letter painter in the promotional department of the Contact cooperative in Ústí nad Labem.
In the mid-1990s, intimate tendencies became more prominent in his work, as can be seen, for example, in the installation Otec, syn / Father, Son (1995). At the Suterén Gallery, he exhibited a series of handkerchiefs from his youth, on which he printed in fragments the authentic text of a letter written by his father before the latter’s suicide. He created a similar textile-linguistic installation, Desatero / The Ten Commandments (1995), for the exhibition Spaces of Time, where he displayed white children’s T-shirts printed with the text of the Ten Commandments. The installation method was reminiscent of a commercial context. Bartůněk’s work makes reference to the civilisational clash between contemporary consumer society and traditional Christian values. His interest in various stages of civilisation and social phenomena – for example, the necessity of a critique of consumer behaviour in respect to ecological thinking – was demonstrated in his series Výbava / Outfit (1997). Here he used bed linen that was kept in his wife’s family, originally from Volhynia, Ukraine. He sewed the textile, which had been stored and repaired for generations, into various compositions and stretched it onto classical frames. Aesthetically, the series may refer to geometric abstract paintings, but this was not the artist’s primary intention. He crowned the conceptual and literal overlap of the work by dedicating a cycle of twenty-three works to his daughter as an outfit to be worn.
He approached painting with a clearly formulated interest in appropriative tendencies in the cycle Anoneneví (2001). Paintings are a metaphor for sociological research. On a classical sociological pie chart the paintings of established foreign artists are quoted in the form of cutouts. Works by Pence, Dubuffet and Barnet Newmann, for instance, or Nicolas de Staёl, Sigmar Polke or Picasso stand side by side. The textual level reappears in the form of instructive questions to the public, which contain a paradoxical irony. These include: “Do you want to play an active role in the problems relating to overpopulation?”; “Do you think it is possible to be proud of your modesty?”; and “Do you believe what you believe in?”
Bartůněk drew on a similar principle of graphic polling in his series Napětí, humor, erotika, láska, násilí / Tension, humour, Eroticism, Love, Violence (2001), in which he ironically adopted the ratings used in the degraded pop culture environment of TV programmes in order to express the ratio between the various genres characterising the film. He thus transferred and applied these evaluations in a completely subjective way to visual codes collected from different cultures and periods. He addressed the devaluation of art and its penetration into advertising and the tabloid environments in the series Zde setřete / Here You Scratch (2004), in which he paraphrased the work of Bridget Riley, Petr Kvíčala, Zdeněk Sýkory, Sophie Tauber-Arp and others. He again cited artworks across styles, with the specific motif of screaming, in the series Svatí / Saints (2006). Here, for the first time, he also focused more explicitly on ornament, which plays an important role in his current work. By depicting a cut-out of a screaming face, an ornament in the background and an adjustment in the form of a folk altar, Bartůněk deals with multiple levels of artistic expression, above all with the deification or hagiography of motifs detached from art history.
He expresses both his recognition and his mockery of iconic figures shaping the history of art in the series Umělec je vetřelec / The Artist is an Alien (2002). In sketches of self-portraits by Van Gogh, Picasso, Schiele, Beckmann, Rembrandt, etc., he introduces the semi-transparent sign of the alien, the artist standing on the fringes of society, the artist who knows more than the general population, the artist as a personality breaking taboos, something that Bartůněk himself does not always deem to be entirely correct. In his other works he explores the possibilities and limits of painting in the image. In A0 (2014), he creates frames in the precise dimensions of the given format. These are then divided into A5. He applies paint by dripping only on the frame and in one of the resulting frames he places another surface protruding into space. The classical representation of painting on canvas is suppressed here by the absence of surface, but at the same time the painting aggressively enters the third dimension.
In his most recent paintings, Bartůněk concerns himself intensively with ornamentation, which he considers a conflict-free and inoffensive visual code. Ornament is mostly perceived positively, though the artist uses it in urgent, symbolically and literally filled paintings. Some of the cycles are transformed into anecdotal content, but with a deep intellectual interest in the subject matter. On a general level, Bartůňka is interested in social relations and even activist themes (consumer society, the political situation), but also in everyday events and personal themes conceived of within a broader framework (erotic motifs, death). Bartůňka’s neo-conceptual overlap is demonstrated by the critically conceived quotations and paraphrases of iconic works of art, as well as the content of the mass media and pop culture messages. From this perspective, his work transcends the regional context, proof of which is his inclusion in the exhibition programme of the Václav Špála Gallery (2000), the Brno House of Arts (2004) and the Jelení Gallery (2007).
