THE ARTISTIC BALANCE OF ANTONÍN KROCA
THE PAINTING AND DRAWING OF ANTONÍN KROCA
THREE REFLECTIONS FOR ANTONÍN KROCA
KAREL BOGAR ...
IVO JANOUSEK ...
THE ARTISTIC BALANCE OF ANTONÍN KROCA
Petr Beranek
The influence of Antonín Kroca (b. 21 October 1947) on the development of contemporary Czech fine art has been so considerable that there is now an urgent need to address the question of documentation and systematic classification of his extensive output within the wider context of the development of Czech modern painting. This has become necessary not only for a definitive confirmation of the important role of his work during the past twenty years in the form of a critical re-assessment, but for a revision of the sadly, widely-held opinion that creative effort in an environment remote from traditional artistic centres cannot be deemed sufficiently worthy for commentary. Yet Kroca succeeds in controvertlng this general perception with the honesty of his struggle for a painting which, rather than striving to be fashionable, reveals the purpose of art by its own physical existence. The fact that the artist's work was so closely connected with life in his birthplace, Dolní Sklenov, remote from the large cultural centres with their media advantages did little to further his cause during the many years in which he exhibited.
In the 70s and 80s, his work was considered unacceptable by the ideological censors of the Association of Czech Fine Artists (SCVU) on account of its uncompromising criticism and stylistic non-conformity. Today, at a time when there is a commercial lobby which exerts influence on a sector of Czech fine art, Kroca has similar difficulties. Nevertheless, the artist has displayed the results of his work in more than twenty solo exhibitions. The most significant of these was a series of exhibitions organised by Ostrava's City Art Gallery in 1992, in Ostrava, Opava and Svatý Kopecek, which succeeded in assembling the most complete survey to date of Kroca's output. In 1995 with the support and encouragement of the village of Hukvaldy, Antonín Kroca opened a public gallery exhibiting his works. The gallery, which is located in the old school of Rychaltice, serves visitors to Hukvaldy including schoolchildren and art professionals. The simply restored attic rooms and another three rooms which include Kroca's studio are open every Sunday afternoon and house an exhibition which is a unique document of the artist and the village's cultural activities. Since its opening, the gallery has been visited by almost two thousand people among them, specialists from the country's state art galleries.
Kroca's output is both disparate and dispersed making it almost impossible to compile a register of his work. ,Furthermore, the selection of works displayed at his exhibitions represents only a fraction of the huge quantity of paintings which are concentrated in the artist's studio, private collections, or more rarely in museums and galleries. In fact many of Kroca's early paintings are to be found in the collections of state museums and galleries, primarily on account of the acquisitions policy of the Department of Culture in the 1970s, which favoured the work of young artists. However, Kroca's work is still not the focus of attention for Czech galleries with purchasing intentions. The most complete collection of his work can be found in Ostrava's City Art Gallery which has been able, as a result of its commitment to fine art of the region to record the development of Kroca's output at least in outline. It was not until an exhibition at Prague's Vincent Kramár Gallery in 1989, which followed a series of local exhibitions in Kroca's region, that a gentle ripple appeared in the still waters of interest in the artist's work. As a result of the freer climate in Prague, Kroca (whose painting from 1988, Ryefield, was not accepted for a collective exhibition of the North Moravian Branch of the Association of Czech Fine Artists) was able to present himself as a memorable artistic personality with a convincing though not large selection of highly expressive paintings. (Cobweb 1988 Small Pigs's Slaughter, 1989; The Large Billiards, 19891. In 1991 and 1992 he exhibited the free cycle Lipany, and again in the Spring of 1995 thanks to the open exhbition program of the Czech Museum of Art in Prague's Carolinum. The exhibition was based on the idea of its curator, Jan Kříž, that a revaluation of the previously neglected "wild painting" as represented in Czech art by the work of Naceradský, Sozanský, Kroca, Šmaha and others was long overdue. In a favourable comparison with Neue Wilde, Jan Kříž argued that the wild expression which acted as a counterpoise to the rational tendencies dominating the world of fine art in the 70s brought attention back to a painting based on dynamism of gesture and colour, and the struggle to express with personal commitment the ambivalence of existential reality.
The manner in which Kroca enjoys his painting, and the character of expressivity in his work which borders on abstraction, brings him the closest to another artist of his generation, Kroca's former friend and colleague the late Jiří Stejskal, whose output is sadly incomplete. Both their work is characterised by an ironic self-reflection, critical distance and insatiable animal greed with which they usurp life on their canvas - always without compromise, and on the basis of life experiences, often painful.
From the lazule paintings of the 70s (reflecting Kroca's academic studies with his teachers Jlří John and Jan Smetanal, in which he used expressive figural motifs (Card Players, 1973; pictures of butchers and butchery stores from the mid-70s; Iri the Kitchen, 1977; The Mask, 1978; Satyricon, 1979) Kroca went on to produce further compositions In the style of Ensor and Soutine during the first half of the 80s (Emil with Peter, 1980; Pub Shindy, 1980; The Large Pig's Slaughter, 1982-84; In the Swimming Pool, 19861. Later, figural compositions were replaced by landscapes, and Kroca's almost gestural handwriting became progressively freer, though he continued to use the same familiar themes drawn from his immediate environment. (Billiards in the Pub; Neighbours' Private Plot; Family Celebration and Kitchen Corner). He maintained a similarly close relationship with the motifs of the Hukvaldy landscape. At the end of the 80s, he created the dramatic Stream cycle. Its prefiguration was a series of sketches for a small stream on a nearby hill. The metamorphosis of the stream through the changing seasons, with the abstract drama of the element of water, inspired the artist to create the monumental cycle by now far removed from the original theme. From this point at the end of the 80s, Kroca's work moved towards large structural oil-paintings, enamels with thick pastes and surfaces of wildly spread synthetic paints (The Burning Forest 1990; Memento 19901. The paintings began to possess the abstract character of "action painting" whilst nevertheless maintaining their figurative sensation and content.
The short period of expressively soaring gestures, tracks and signs on a white background (The White Plains, early 1990s1, seems to have been, in the context of Kroca's development, a reaction to his former use of pastose colour coating. This expressive contrast of process in painting did not only have a formal character. It was felt philosophically, and was undubitably conditioned by the period of difficult events earlier in the artist's life. In 1991, the artist completed the monumental twelve metres long painting drama for the foyer of the theatre in Nový Jicín. Any doubts about the suitability of a hung paintlng for a theatre interior were soon dispelled by the time the finished work was in place. This is a work with unique force. Kroca's total creative concentration was engaged by his intense enjoyment of the big theme, and a respect for the challenge of uncompromising conditions for which he ultimately found an effective technical solutlon. He moves from automatism of gesture to internal enjoyment, and then to expression of a mixture of existential feelings and passlonate life reflections.
During the next five years, the artist created a succulent series of bouquets, portraits, and female nudes returning again with an even stronger colour expressivity, to figural composltions of the themes which are Kroca's destiny - the life of a simple village family, the pub's rowdy din, the pig's slaughter. Often he interpreted the tragi-comic atmosphere with uncompromising sarcasm and a skill for self-deprecation. Kroca's paintings are "truths" - the unembellished images of unhidden life feelings evoked by personal life pleasures. Kroca colourfully depicts them. He is not interested in depicting optical perceptions but in conveying the atmosphere of erotic vibrations, tastes, aromas and tactile feelings where of course the obvious attribute is authenticity of enjoyment and painting process. For Kroca painting is the form of being (Petr Holýl. The paintings of Kroca are not really paintings of landscapes or figural compositions. They are paintings of the materialising internal action of painting which for Kroca is synonymous with life and which transforms and renews the painter's soul. Kroca endeavours to portray himself and in so doing, portrays the human being. Sometimes with compassion and sometimes with a harsh exposure of the naked and unembellished truth about himself, he influences through his painting, the biological fundament and anatomy of the human soul.
THE PAINTING AND DRAWING OF ANTONIN KROCA
Jan Kriz
A highly dramatic style of figurative painting which climaxes into a frenzy of free abstraction is an uncommon phenomenon in Czech fine art. It is a form of painting which disrupts the comfortable routine of our daily lives with It's cosy predictability, in the way that something breaks up the surface of gently rippling waters In the early morning or evenlng breeze. Antonín Kroca's paintings storm our sensibilities with an agitation which reminds us of the beating of waves by strong gusts of wind. It is a powerfully sensuous almost sensual painting in which both the body and soul of the artist are engaged. Kroca substitutes the idea of the body as an organised anatomic formation for a painting anarchy which at best serves to facilitate the intervention ot instinctive anirriality. The artist captivates us with a style of painting based on aggressive contrasts and disharmonies. This spontaneous visual transcription of unbridled vitality carries the painting towards a brutal explosionalism - an inevitable form of aesthetic ecstasy. It is a transcendence which is sated by the immediate naturalism arising from the physical enjoyment of being which we also recognise as the path to a higher spirituality ot life.
Antonín Kroca left the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in 1973, at a time when students were expected to work within the conventions of realism. Fortunately, the work of his teachers (Jirí John and Jan Smetana) was unaffected by the dogmatism of this period and, in fact, they both worked with a certain amount of abstraction. In the case of Smetana in particular, abstraction rarely dominated, but was more often something which the artist had recourse to when necessary, In contrast, Kroca staked everything on wild figuration. He cared little for lucid construction of pictorial space or stylisation of forms when he based his painting on a furioso of drawing and painting gestures. His outlook on life, probably influenced by the absurdity of political events, represented a loss of faith in humanity which seems to have given rise to the discontent which had its manifestation in his caricatural, naturalising, expressive condensatíon of figural types. A deliberate imprecision of scale, the free placement of figures and expressive condensations in the shallow depression of pictorial space were fused together in Kroca's painting to create a typical example of expressive figuration. The search for a path somewhere between abstraction and figuration was for many of Kroca's generation a matter of course. However, most of them went on to adopt a more compact form of organisatlon in their painting and a certain symbolic norm. Interest in a human theme was more common and often expressed through intellectual sarcasm or dramatic symbolism. Yet it Is Kroca who has ensured for himself a special place in this temporal context with a certain primitive barbarism of selection and interpretation of motlf. His paintings seem intent on ignoring civilisation's fetishism for contemporary history. With the uncontrolled brutality of his painting, Kroca seems to wrench himself out of the context of his generation's artist's groups of the 1970s Although as more time elapses, the differences will seem less important. Yet for all that, Kroca made his presence felt. In 1978, he participated in Konfrontace II, which during this period was among the significant acts of defiance committed by young people, in which members strived for artistic efficiency and proclaimed as indissoluble, the imperative of artistic freedom. The role of those who did not participate directly in the major activities of the 1980s has not until today been fully appreciated. It is certain that Kroca's place here was an important one. Clearly the way which Kroca chose had and still has analogies in the world today.
Kroca's single-minded pursuit of his artistic objectives is illustrated by the fact that he has repaired to his birthplace, Dolní Sklenov, near Hukvaldy in the foothills of the Beskydy Mountains, and it is here that he finds in his daily contact with the harsh realities of village life a lasting source of inspiration. However, it would be erroneous to assume that this momentous decision has led to a stagnation of his painting. After the figural thematicism of the 70s, the dramatism of his defiantly independent idiom and the archetypally elemental nature of his artistic expression bordering on abstraction begin to dominate more and more. In this sense, Antonín Kroca follows an original and creative path in his painting with an extensive range of possibilities between the genre of reportage of concrete scene and action and the dynamic metaphor of the liberated painting gesture and colourful expression. Antonín Kroca as both man and artist has the ability to insinuate himself into the pub's rowdy din, to assimilate the appropriate impulse and rhythm, and his fresh impressions are busily transcribed into a vortex of painting. His own psychological temperament guarantees those things which we value especially highly in his paintings - the identification of a spontaneous explosion of life with the dynamism of his painting. So the spectator together with the author can derive a fascinating ecstasy from these paintings and often fails to realise that he himself has become transposed into the pub's rowdy din.
The direction Kroca has taken in his work had and still has its parallels in Europe, particularly in the wave of renewed interest in expressive painting, and the dramatic conception of tigurative painting respectively. This first manifested itself in German painting of the 70s. It was the opposite pole to the radical rationalism of certain types of conceptual art. On the one side stood the cold calculatedness of meaning, and on the other, the exhibitionism of emotion. In the case of Kroca, the pendulum of artistic development shifted to the radical position of dramatic expression. This tendency, which Kroca did not pursue in its entirety, also encompassed the evocation of action, the allegory of history, symbols of personal mythology and so on. In his concentration on the genre of simple life, with which he was reunited in his birthplace, he created within these tendencies something very original. This type of perspective allowed Kroca to launch a thunderstorm of expressively colourful and spontaneously dramatic painting at the same level as the most prominent works of neo-expressionistic movements throughout the world.
The wild character of Kroca's painting was realised in a wide range of traditional themes such as, for example, intimate sections of landscape, the female nude, still life or portrait. It seems natural that it was landscape and the female nude which surrendered to hfs paintbrush and charcoal. Both themes revealed themselves to the painter with a desire for Identification with the genre of the painters dramatic vision. Yet the painter dfd not usurp the themes of landscape and nude with the power of his gesture but through a sensftivity to intimate states of meaning and inspirational realities. He sensed that in nude and landscape he could find objects which, with their aesthetic qualities and appeal to actíve emotional experience could inspire his means of expression.
Kroca achieved artistic success with a number of female nude cycles in which he barely concealed his fascination for the erotic beauty of his models. Some of these drawings are very close to abstraction, but for all that, the aim of their content is the expression of melody within the harmonic contour of force of a woman's body. Due to the nature of the medium of charcoal drawing, every line can express the most gentle vibrations of love's tendernesses. These are superb works, almost unexpected from an artist who usually presses us with the fanatic ruthlessness of expressive gesture.
From time to time, the desire for a return to absolute abstraction continued to grow even after the appearance of figurative painting on the world scene. Since the 1950s there were, and still are today painters who have never moved away from an expressive, slightly symbolically configurated abstraction. Others continued to discover abstraction unexpectedly again and again. In the abstractions of gestural and informal types which took their name from the technology of "synthetics", Kroca began to employ a rich spectrum of informal means of expression - from expressive gesturalism to autonomous structure. Its expressfon is determined by the self-movement of its drying colours. After that, abstraction, with all its essence of expressive potentiality, metamorphoses into a metaphor of the cosmos. The cosmos in Kroca's interpretation, however seems to be the space which is controlled by animal vitality if not by the pan-eroticism of the artist's autonomous lyrical dramas of painting.
The work of Antonín Kroca, has been precisely interpreted on many occasions by the Ostravian art theorists Petr Holý and Petr Beránek. His work fascinated Prague on the occasion of a previous exhibition which was organised by the Czech Museum of Fine Arts in the historical Ambulatory of the Carolinum in 1995. Today's extended exhibition conffrms yet again, the legitimacy of the special place which the paintfng of Antonín Kroca has been accorded in the evaluation of Czech fine art of recent decades.
THREE REFLECTIONS FOR ANTONIN KROCA
Petr Holy
At the outset, I offer no excuses. Instead, an explanation: I have already supplied introductions for the catalogues of many Kroca exhibitfons. (Twice for the chateau in Frýdek-Místek, and once for the chateau in Nový Jicín, the City Art Gallery in Ostrava, the Vincenc Kramář Gallery in Prague etc.) On this occasion, Jan Kříž and Petr Beránek will do the honours and that is why I have chosen another means of visiting this garden. I will not enter by the gate, but through a gap in the fence, a time-honoured but god-forsaken hole, and I will settle on the branch of an apple-tree. Here, I will savour the taste of the luscious flesh of the tree's fruit in my mouth while I nurture the hope in my spirit that this Is "that tree".
I .
Standing on the threshold of a recognition of tastes as necessary for an understanding of that apparent ultimate, that rerriarkable circulation in the foetus, I pose a few questions provocative, perhaps even heretical: Just how much did Masaccio lose, in progressing still further than Glotto? And again, in another period of human endeavour: What was it that Monet forfeited while seemingly surpassing Turner?
These questions are not addressed to style as a structural order about itself, but to style as a human being. I feel increasingly certain that in both cases, the losses were irnmense even though the irrevocable causality of these losses was and still is regarded by many as victorious. From this alarming perception of increaslng emptiness, this vision of gaping nothingness, intense feelings of necessity arise, and impulses for retrospection which do not indicate helplessness, but rather, a desire to re-discover something like completeness without and within.
Here we have the characteristic signature of Antonín Kroca. The primary always has that taste of truthfulness because originality, not as unconditional originality which is terminologically commutative, goes hand in hand with the thiassic self-delusion of modern art, but some telluric maternity of origin is for Kroca fundamental to his artistic statement. His painting is not a manifestation of individuality as distance, on which in our times of falling reciprocity on a universal fundament, pride is measured. Instead, his work represents an activity of perrnanent relations. Nis paintings realise these relations as a deep understanding and this excludes the act of usurpation. Thus when we usurp in the sense of relations, we lose. But when we enter, we not only gain, but we are being. In this sense, it is easy to understand why for Antonín Kroca, painting is the forrn of being, because it is a form of co-existence as well; an activity of relationship with the world of life, which by implication, suggests relationships with other human beings too. Metaphorically speaking, he who addresses also listens.
II.
If a lonely individual of our time wishes to be delivered frorn his loneliness, he deafens himself, doing so because he feels forsaken. One perspective on the history of the human spirit reveals to us the followlng drama: when God abandoned Man (although it also seems to have happened vice versal, faith hecame sick, and this sickness was theology, and religiori began to rest in greater part in ritual only. Then art began to usurp the role of religion - believing that it alone could find the answers to the world's questions. At the end of our century, not only has art abdicated this responsibility; it has emigrated, and resigned from it's premise of truth to derrionstratively proclaim that it has dumped the need for the message. This we can understand as a consequence of disillusionment, arising from a feeling of uselessness and uncommunicativeness amidst the loneliness. (A remembrance of Leibniz's monads is not inappropriate herel.
In Antonín Kroca's work, we cannot find such complexes as arrogance or the desperation of decadence. His work is a convulsive part of the spontaneous human world which itself flows continuously into Kroca's ouput, making it a comprehensible world of it's own inside which it connects with the changeable oneness of Nature. The pub's rowdy din, billiards, the pig's slaughter, sheep-shearing, the crazy old hag... all these and rnany others enter as a matter of course into the flowing stream which Kroca paints so many times as a dynamic universum of the world, or they melt into lava waves of viscous colours, horrifying, brightly misty, unknowingly fatal and abysmal in this time of life's dangers. That is why the explosive volcanic is more the glow of lava than of fire. A descent to the deeper layers of the human spirit can arouse a suspicion of the omniprescence of archetypal and subconscious memories of foetal waters to an almost ecstatic reverie of the still current of the river of unreturnability. Gaston Bachelard wrote that "this dreaming of materialisation - dreaming about substance - takes place on the borderline of dreaming about forms" and furthermore, that "the substance is subconscious of form". Something similar to this; something fundamentally liquid happens with Kroca's colours. Colour is already not only a phenomenon of life but it revives, it has its own substantial life, which imitates our dreaming. It is a prolapse of life's tissue of dreams - good or bad. An a priori correction here does not have space for its realisation because its right to appear, in the universal sense, and this is said with pathos, has the same relationship to Man as that of Man with God. It is not in its created being escaping trom consequence. Antonín Kroca proves, through the power and truthfulness of his painting, that to be primary is to be universal.
III.
Old Greece created sculptures which were usurpers of beauty. The sculptors crafted a physical perfection the consequence of which was a normative injustice. It is a permanence of reproof embodied in innocent eyes behind which the comparative injustice is hatching. This is a tyranny of inhuman form hidden subterfugally in human shape. They created sculptures of gods and gave them eternity of beauty which was monstrous because the gods of these myths were full of perfidiousness, sexual deviations, vanity, selfishness and jealousy, greedy for power, and arbitrary meddlers in destiny. Their only value lay in their immortality, and their creators imagined a beauty which too would conjoin with eternity on Earth, It was a perverted eternity, loftier than the moral norm which lay claim to the title for sole beauty. Perfection of human shape excludes inhumanity, and it was elevated to the status of art because order, enumerative harmony and ideality outside and contrary to the right to life was given to it. "Diadumenos" by Polyclitus and "Hermes" by Praxiteles are situated at the polar opposite to the man with six fingers or the calf with two heads. Not, however, because they are closer to truth. Their delusive beauty is as perverted as the irnage of the two-headed calf. Misguided individuals living under a homo-chauvinistic illusion can't concede it, but the calf with two heads or the man with six fingers stir the senses more violently because they create horror, anguish and sympathy within us. Their honesty lies not in the regularity of the model but in the way in which they show us how to find amidst the nonsense, some sense or even intention. They compel us to stand before this gate of secrets that is the immeasurableness of beauty - not enumerable but forever unanswerable. That is why in front of this gate, we always find philosophy and art in their most lucid forms. Here is the robust dog of Kroca's paintings... scratching the doors.
"Kroca's persona belongs closely to that of his compatriot from Hukvaldy, Leoš Janácek. Janácek notated the speech of birds to create a unique musical language of our century. Kroca notes down the forms and colours of streams, in order to become closer to the most fantastic symphonies of world abstractionists. In his large compositions, the reality while absent remains present."
Karel Bogar:
Catalogue for the exhibition Antonín Kroca - Streams, Beskydy Museum
Frydek-Mistek, 1992
"The stream as a natural dynamic phenomenon changes at every moment, not only throughout the seasons but also in the metamorphosis of daylight, in the waterfall, and in its own mobility. The meeting with it is the event which confirms the saying "Panta rhei". This is the confirmation of unrepeatability, a flowing of time and of life, our existence. That is why here - in an endeavour to amalgamate painting process with enjoyment - the classic painting technique is insufficient, and the artist chooses synthetic enamels. The spreading of colourful paste is replaced by a spilling stream of colours. Furthermore, in the arabesque of currents and the alluvium of lacquers - Kroca not only reaches a greater intensity of expression, but by abstracting from the external model he reaches the threshold of unportrayable creation."
Ivo Janousek:
Catalogue for the exhibition Antonín Kroca Reflections of Nature,
NTM Praha 1996