Petr Veselý works mainly with painting and drawing. However, he also brings objects into his work and even text and poetry have an important place. For most of his life Veselý has been part of the Brno art scene as both artist and poet and teacher. At present he heads the department of painting at the Secondary School of Art and Design in Brno, and from 2002 to 2007 was head of Painting I Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology. His teaching activities and the popularity he enjoys amongst students and the public at large is evidence of the considerable influence he enjoys over the development of young artists and generally on the world of contemporary painting and fine art. Veselý himself studied at the Brno Secondary School of Applied Arts and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) at the studio of landscape and figurative painting headed by Professor Jan Smetana. The environment at AVU allowed him not only to work intensively and liberate his painting technique, but involved important meetings that influenced the direction he was to take. In the mid-1980s, he became a member of the Tovaryšstvo malířské (Journeyman Painting) group along with Vladimír Kokolia, Petr Kvíčala and Jan Steklík. Though each has a different style, they share an emphasis on painterly material, surface feature, and detachment from the figural. This is clear in Veselý’s work, and several painting feature only a pure monochrome surface. Nevertheless, there is always a strong link to reality, to material such as wood or paper, and to items that are part of our everyday lives.
Along with painting and drawing, Petr Veselý also works with texts that he incorporates into the canvas in the form of words, his own thoughts, poems, or quotations from popular poets. He created a series of textual drawings in which he explores and extends the possibilities of working with text as visual resource. However, the word is not abstracted from its semantic content and therefore holds out the possibility of a double reading: as a set of contours and lines in terms of composition and creative structure, or as a poem or thought committed to paper or canvas. We also find collages on which the artist fixed scraps of newspaper reports that create the final form of the “drawing”. The form of lettering, the way it is placed on the surface, and its size and density are then matched with the words and sentences. The text is transformed into the texture of the drawing and the boundary between the two becomes blurred.
The titles of individual cycles of paintings, drawings and objects such as Formats, Fragments, Layers and Rooms, Ceilings, Doors also tells much about Veselý’s way of thinking. They refer to the ongoing exploration of his immediate surroundings, an emphasis on locus, detailed attention given to individual elements, and form reduced to its essence. This is borne out by Veselý’s use of colour combinations restricted mainly to white, grey and black. In several cases a rich red appears, highlighting a certain form or contour possessing symbolic significance. He himself refers to his work as a focussing, in which, like a photographer, he concentrates on an individual fragment of reality, but also on the significance and content of this fragment, and it is painting that allows him the freedom to do this. With the aid of painting he underlines the character of an item or the properties of a material, its place in space and in human life, and opens up a deeper perspective upon it that in itself contains a spiritual dimension. The objects that feature time and time again in his paintings include doors, doorframes, made-up beds, a metal bath, a perspective into a room reduced to basic contours and lines, or the layers and structures of different materials transferred to canvas. According to Jiří Valoch, Veselý lyrically re-evaluates the depicted and thus offers a kind of message of the thing. These objects do not then appear only in paintings, but are used physically and included in his work. This transferral, literal quotation, and the physical presence of items and materials is employed in the creation of objects.
The meaning of what a painting, drawing or object comprises is often ambiguous in Veselý’s work. Doors are painted and hung as though wall paintings, a drawing on paper is torn to reveal the surface of the wood beneath. Most of the artist’s work with wood, wooden boards or planks can be ranked alongside his objects. These are placed next to each other, nailed together, placed against a wall, or situated in space. This is all reminiscent of the work of Arte Povera in the 1960s. However, Veselý’s work is cleaner, in the best sense of the word. Its character and effect is different, mainly because of its link with place, i.e. with Czech culture and landscape. The former forge in Brno-Jundrov, in which he lives alongside the past and the memory of his ancestors and which forms the title of his volume of poems Jundrov, has had a huge influence on him. He himself regards an awareness of atmosphere and memory of place to be the main themes that have accompanied him throughout his life.
