2024-10-01 21:57:31
Children in the ruins of an inhospitable housing estate, fantastic creatures with animal body parts and scenes from outer space. The painter Josef Bolf is exhibiting at the DOX Contemporary Art Center in Prague until January 5 next year. This time, small formats are in the foreground. “I needed to think differently about pictures at that moment. I enjoy that on a small surface I have to stop the movement instead of booming,” he says.
In the courtyard of an apartment block in Prague’s Old Town, a large painting palette hangs on the railing. It welcomes visitors like a signboard, hopefully so that no one can mistake that this is where Josef Bolf’s studio is. He is said to have inherited the decoration from a previous resident.
The fifty-two-year-old leading Czech artist spends almost every day in the studio, arriving in the morning and leaving in the early evening. “I need daylight to work,” he explains. This flows into a relatively large space the size of a smaller apartment through two skylights. But as the father of the children he is raising with the painter Jana Vojnárová, Bolf also wants to devote himself to his family, so he tries to leave sensibly.
He does not work in a linear fashion, for fifteen or twenty minutes he immerses himself deeply in the painting, then leaves the emerging work for a while. “I need to be fully focused on it, but not in the normal sense of the word. I need to be in the moment,” he explains. Sometimes he goes for a walk, when he can’t paint at all, he is said to be trying to clean in the studio. “To feel like I’m at least doing something,” he laughs.
The entrance to Josef Bolf’s studio is decorated with a palette almost like a signboard. | Photo: Honza Mudra
The room is full of creative clutter – canvases, paints, cutters, art books and magazines. Only one painting is painted on the easel. A few days ago, Josef Bolf opened his latest exhibition in Prague’s DOX and is now slowly starting to work again. “Only the last two or three days,” he elaborates. He is convinced that doubts also belong to the creative process. “Right now, for example, I doubt whether it was a good idea to build the entire exhibition on small formats. But it’s okay, doubts are part of painting,” he admits before returning to larger formats.
He had this vision since the exhibition at the National Gallery, where in 2019 he presented about twenty small works. Together with the curator of the current exhibition, Otto M. Urban, they finally came to the conclusion that its center of gravity would be precisely in small dimensions. Small square canvases stretch like a belt along the walls of the DOX center in Holešovice, and here and there a larger picture sneaks in between them.
Josef Bolf worked his way into small painting by accident. He wanted to make use of various scraps of canvases that had accumulated in his studio. “I made such studies on them for larger paintings. And gradually they began to develop as an independent genre,” he describes. Most painters gravitate towards large canvases on which they can really swing. “However, at that moment I needed to think differently about the paintings and the exhibition. I enjoy that on a small surface I have to stop the movement instead of booming,” he describes another way of working with gestures.
He called the current exhibition Melancholy of Outer Limits. This is not a complete set of images, but a selection from the last eight years or so. Together, it should form a mosaic of his inner world. “He paints them with an intensity that gives him at least the illusion that his inner world can connect with the outer one,” wrote curator Urban.
Josef Bolf’s studio is full of creative clutter. When he can’t paint, he tries to clean it. | Photo: Honza Mudra
Memories and his own childhood have been a fundamental theme for Bolf for many years. His sketchbook, which can be seen in the small cinema hall at the exhibition, contains a lot of deformed portraits of girls, but more often boys, whose skin is melting like wax or whose skin is broken up with a felt-tip pen. They resemble an animal going to slaughter.
Compared to previous years, however, the artist perceives that his images stick to memories of growing up less rigidly – more on a symbolic level – and are more open to different interpretations. A housing estate, for example, often appears on them, today more like a typical block of flats than a reference to a specific place. “Before, I even went to the given locations, for example to the school, took pictures of them and tried to transfer the place, of course with some mistakes,” compares the painter who grew up in Prague’s South Town with his previous methods.
For him, the housing estate is a matter of memories, not something related to today. Galactic scenes, images of star nebulae displayed on small canvases, dominated by pink, purple or green, also appear in the work of recent years. “I was repainting photos from the Hubble Space Telescope, and then I realized that they actually also refer to the past. That the image that comes to us is already history,” he explains. He also has about six black-and-white photos of the universe stuck on the wall of his studio. At the same time, he reflects on his progress. “Even though we think we’re painting the past, we’re actually painting it as we perceive it now, in the moment,” he muses.
One of the techniques is also related to childhood, which is scraping instead of applying paint. In this way, he processes some details on small paintings. “It’s about applying ink to wax paper. The ink is then scraped off. It’s already taught in kindergarten or elementary schools. But there’s also a reference to a Renaissance fresco. I enjoy the fact that traditionally in painting, paint is applied, whereas I’m uncovering it here. Similar to how different layers of a person are revealed in psychoanalysis,” he compares.
Over the years, Bolf’s works have received the nickname “dark” in the media, but he does not identify with it too much. “It’s rather tiring,” he assesses. He perceives his work mainly as a key to self-knowledge, he mentions that he is still a mystery to himself. According to him, fine art can also serve as a means to look at the world through someone else’s eyes. But he admits that – as the title of the exhibition suggests – he is prone to melancholy, which also comes to him from the outside. “We don’t live in simple times, there are a lot of conflicts in the world, so maybe my work is also a manifestation of a certain helplessness,” he says.
Video: The worst thing is when the audience is silent in the cinema, says the court translator of Disney (23/09/2024)
A bad translation or dubbing can spoil a lot of things, said Vojtěch Kostiha, one of the translators of the Disney+ video library, in the Spotlight show. | Video: Team Spotlight