Josip Karamatic EN...

Vloženo: 24.09. 2024

Pavel Hogel, or simply pan Hogel (the way I always address him) is the person responsible for strong art and cultural connections between Makarska and Olomouc. We have used every invitation, e-mail or meeting in Makarska or Olomouc as another opportunity to know each other better. Since our first contact in 2015, the tasks involving the organization of exhibitions have been the main topics of our conversations, while Hogel’s painting was always somehow set aside. In fact, we didn’t have much time. It was only now and then that we merely entered the sphere of his work of art, but never in detail and with the attention it deserved.

However, upon our first meeting, I was very much aware of the fact that he was a true artist, a valuable painter and a proud member of the Union of Visual Artists of Olomouc. I immediately recognized that he was an artist of a classic painting profile, immersed in creation in the silence of his atelier… Soon, I concluded that he was also fascinated by abstraction. I was able to confirm that when I visited his atelier in 2016.

The abstraction in Pavel Hogel’s painting contains a strong inner dynamics of a lyrical echo, it doesn’t run away from colours and is very open to the observer. The gesture is significantly calmed, and the construction of the shot contains the reminiscences of the real. It could be said that these works are full of restrained, yet present narrativity. The central zone of his paintings always stays close together, while the combinations of coloured backgrounds serve as a means of the articulation of scenes. The developed structures of presentation dynamize the canvases, while the structures in drawings are more subjected to reduction that always, and such is the case in Hogel’s work, depends on the author’s wishes. The author’s subtle concentration on a sign is more suggested than followed through. Such a characteristic singles him out of from the context of consistent followers of abstract expressionism.

If we consider the presented paintings from Makarska’s point of view, we might recognize lights and colours of Makarska in it. And that is a component that could connect Makarska to Pavel Hogel’s painting. It is the colour that makes his art opus, whose significant anniversary is marked by this exhibition, so interesting. The colour in Pavel Hogel’s paintings, with its sentimentality and meditativeness, communicates strongly towards the outside in manners ofwell-educated abstraction.

Josip Karamatic (1978)
art historian and historian
curator and director of the City Gallery Antun Gojak Makarska
lives and works in Makarska (Republic of Croatia)