K/ART/OGRAFIE PAVLA HOGELA EN...

Vloženo: 24.09. 2024

Art historian Mahulena Nešlehová wrote in her study about the Czech art of 1950s and the first half of 1960s that the tradition of the Czech informel is bound to existentialism, respectively to its two elementary moments: authenticity and freedom. It was the deep existential experience that helped the artists to emancipate from the conceptually elaborated picture and the world of relaxed gestures, events and signs opened to them.

Paintings and drawings of artist Pavel Hogel from the years 1998 and 2019 are part of certain tradition of the Czech informel, especially in its need for authenticity and freedom. Compared to fractal chaotic conception of painting of many painters of the Czech informel, Hogel emphasizes the singularity of the art events.

His structured, in some way, informel selfresemblance evokes something from the old maps. As if his art stories were the descriptions of hidden state of things and life events. Pavel Hogel as an art c/art/tographer implies and at the same time marks that something is distant, something is designated as a special area, something is unbeatable and something hides the thing itself.

This is the basic secret of Hogel´s c/art/tography. At the same time it is not important if any art map picture is diminished or magnified against the original object.

The painting Vidění v slunci (Vision in the sun, oil, 1999) is emancipated from the common circle morphology of the sun with its eruption activity etc., because the painting offers rather a map of seeing.

The art historian Ernst Gombrich describes in his study Analýzy vidění umění long conceptual disputes between seeing and knowing, between, e.g. Ruskin´s conception of innocent eye and Berkley´s seeing as constructing and in the end recalls the statement of the writer Oscar Wilde that the fog did not exist in London until Whistler painted it.

Visual artists are c/art/tographs who teach us to view the maps according to their pictures.

Also Hogel´s c/art/tography reveals complex spiritual process of discovering new worlds and leads us to the inner and outer orientation of our gradually adopting invisible world.

However, Hogel´s art operation does not consist in any measuring of the outer world because such a world has been previously incorporated into the inner architecture of cognitive art-map structures and human history.

C/art/tography has a special subjective function—it reveals the subjectivity process as a production of many ways of our existence. Following the speech of Hogel´s paintings and drawings, we know that old artmaps or cognitive c/art/tographic plans are projected in the background, preserved by, e.g. Hans Hartung, Henri Michaux, Michel Tapié and others.

What is strictly divided in traditional and scientific cartography, for example in the form of astronomical and geographical maps according to special exact scale, is in c/art/tography perceived as a whole. For c/art/tography, the world, microworld as well as celestial bodies are equally close to each other. While c/art/tographic works strengthen our orientation habit and help us not to lose our way, c/art/tographic maps show us instantly that it is not possible to convert the world into simple and exact map picture of some art coordinates. Such artmaps express the special need of humans to emancipate from learned map habits and explore still unlikely situations, art events and stories.

C/art/tography rid us of the paradigms of certainty.

Also Pavel Hogel´s artistic works follow the route of improbability which is a philosophic expression of rejection of all attempts of “grasping” the reality.

For example, for military maps it is necessary to depict correctly all the dimensions related to, e.g. some gorge. Hogel´s artmap view of Soutěska (Gorge, 1996, encaustic) is a dramatic clash of colours in dropping environment of art uncertainty.

Using the intuitive method, the artist catches the world of observable objects and events in paradigmatic uncertainty of life. Regular square art windows evoke pictures of special structures as during the reception of sensitive satellite camera which intercepts distant and unknown planetary objects. It depicts traces of an event as for example in painting Příběh v modré (Story in blue, 1999, oil), V prostorách radosti (In the space of joy, 1999, acryl), etc.

In some situations, the artmap object becomes the expression of the symbol itself. For example, the painting Propast (Abyss, 1999, oil) expresses the danger of solitude. The picture can symbolise either any abyss or carelessly covered depth, or imaginary insatiable mouth. It can be an abyss, which bares its imaginary teeth at the victim just like empty or dark speech. There is always something dumb in the abyss and Hogel´s picture-symbol has the power to break and violate this silence.

Traditional maps are characterized by temporality as for example some archival document. This is proved by contemporary collecting interest when the historicity of old maps is especially valued. However, c/art/tography generates different temporality showed by an actual art message which is based on unetropic happening in a special hermeneutic situation. For example, Hogel´s painting Znamení (Sign, 2001, oil) depicts not only an event in time but simultaneously recalls the time of new interpretation of the cross event in the yellow area as a moved picture in artistic uncertain eternity.

Mirek Vodrážka, Úholičky, Prague 2020

Mirek Vodrážka

Musician, chaos theorist, independent journalist. In the 1970s he wrote manifestos of emotionalism and promoted music of the same direction in the underground. Charged with felony disorderly conduct and sentenced to several years of protective court supervision due to "social danger". In the 1980s he was a co-organizer of housing seminars of Egon Bondy, Milan Balabán and Milan Machovec as well as conspiratorial meetings of Charter 77 spokespersons. After 1989, he was editor of the magazine VOKNO, in whose illegal publication he participated in the underground from 1978. In the 1990s, he opened feminist and transgender discussions in the media.

He has published FEMINIST CONVERSATIONS ON "SECRET SERVICES" (1996), CHAOCRACY (1997), ESSAY ON POLITICAL HAREMISM (1999), DECIVILIZATION (2007), MANIFEST OF EXISTENTIAL HISTORY (2011), PHILOSOPHY OF THE BODY OF HISTORY (2013). He published the musical project Psychochaos & Edita Adlerová - Ženský smutek (1999) and Carminafemina - oratory of the female soul with singer Helena Zaoralová (2006).