Metamorphosis of Transformation

Author: Jiří Petrbok
Curator: Silvia Van Espen
27 January 2012 – 25 February 2012

The exhibition entitled Metamorphoses of transformation presents – through the concentrated election of works – a key theme of Jiří Petrbok, a Czech painter (born 1962), that is, a metamorphosis of picture and its expression, a transformation as a parallel process: on the one hand, recycling of the perceived, on the other hand, the transformation of the perception. Petrbok´s pictures can be retrospectively (and only retrospectively!) referred to as models of deconstruction which – both consciously and subconsciously – integrate social and individual experience of mental and physical nature. The author works – as one of a few contemporary Czech painters – synthetically and offers persuasive complex experience to a viewer. Thus he rehabilitates, together with seemingly outdated figuration, a new, or rather an “other“, a “different“ content as well, which corresponds with current problematic social climate with its irritating unstability. In his distinctive way, he therefore represents a larger critical tendency which can be seen in Central European painting across the boundaries.

Petrbok´s pictorial “transformation“, both of expression and of content, undergoes more complicated process. Within the scope of one overarching complex transformation, it consists of the whole range of smaller, parallel and skew partial transformations which all together form the dynamic structure of a work of art, with its remarkable (even romantic) allegorical character. Hence the paradox in the title of the exhibition. What goes on is a sort of mirroring of the process: the small(er) one in the large(r) one and the other way round.

The author joins historical motives and the contemporary ones in collages. He makes usual conventional attributes (such as: heart, dragon, lion, skull, star, cross) topical. They are taken out of their original context and become elements of a new whole. Thus the author ironizes their historical context, but at the same time he transforms it into a contemporary myth, a sort of topicalized “para-narration“ which is the reverse side of the original side of legends. Within this process, he reveals natural rules and relations of creating a picture itself, which has a large impact and effect on the further form of a picture. What is in question here is a different role of separated and then integrated signs deprived of their symbolic meaning previously related to their historical (or promotional) context. Nevertheless, when evoking their symbolism, there is a certain subconscious automatism in their perception (heart = love, lion = Bohemia, dragon = Satan). Neither the proportions and measures of objects and figures (a heart is the same size as a dragon and so on), nor the conventions of colouring (a blue dragon, a heart in the national tricolour) are respected. Consequently, their composition creates a different, surprising, dreamy structure of the picture whole, as if it was a constantly changeable dynamic plane.