2024-05-05 13:35:46
What best describes a person? Painter Daniel Pitín covered and blurred parts of his imaginative film-inspired paintings for so long that he took a radical step: he completely erased the human face. By some magic, the subject made the person stronger. More precisely, man and his future.
The exhibition entitled Community of New Arrivals, which will run until May 18 at Prague’s Hunt Kastner gallery, is Pitín’s first solo show in the Czech Republic after three years. In the meantime, he presented in Dresden, New York, Berlin and Vienna. One of the most successful local artists is now showing the people of Prague only nine paintings from this year and last year. In all cases of complicated paintings with elements of collage. They combine oil and acrylic paints, and also mix in ash.
The layered paintings are crowded with things, fragments of furniture or urban architecture, punctuated by a rough, collage-like texture. An abundance of things, the meaning of which is not always obvious, does not seem chaotic. The forty-six-year-old painter observes perspective and places human figures in the center of the canvas. Some kind of “new arrivals”, descendants from the not-too-distant future.
“I imagined some society of people that would come and have our cultural links, our memory, but not understand it,” says Daniel Pitín in the video for the exhibition. “I imagined that something was happening there that I don’t understand from today’s perspective, that I can’t understand. That idea began to liberate me. The future affects a lot what happens here and now,” concludes the author, who filled the idea of the future with a certain familiarity . Perhaps this is due to the warm color tones, reminiscent of the atmosphere of colored films and their scenes. The future does not have to be dark, it consists of familiar parts, fragments of the present and the past.
The mysterious and perhaps serious atmosphere of the exhibition is emphasized by a well-thought-out installation. No image hangs in the direction of the visitor’s first glance. The deep blue color of the wall at the end of the gallery divided into small rooms evokes a feeling of undisturbed infinity. Only after a few steps do the paintings emerge in each hall.
The figures in the large and complicated paintings have their faces covered, or their entire heads are replaced by spheres or other geometric shapes. Thus, an important part to recognize the mood is missing.
Pitín’s figures lack faces. The picture shows the oil painting The Painter from 2023. | Photo: Hunt Kastner Gallery
Is the girl standing in a drained pool somewhere on the coast scared? Is a man leaning possessively against what might be a new car with a woman at his side a cocky dude? Are the dancing couple bored in the elegant golden hall? And what is the woman doing in the living room bending over what could be the body of another mutant with a ball instead of a head? The facial expression doesn’t tell.
The details and the background speak all the more: books carefully arranged on a shelf or flowers in a flowerpot are a symbol of home and care, the blackened window frame of the block of flats office may be charred, but the new resident has settled in anyway.
The hands of the girl in the pool remain slightly open in a gesture of acceptance, and the warm sun renders the softness of the palms. The world in Pitín’s paintings is incomprehensible, but it seems okay.
“I don’t want to make any scientific forecast of the future from the perspective of ecology or economics,” says the author about his latest paintings. “What will shape it is probably already somehow anchored in our present and past. That is why my paintings contain layers, structures formed by scraps of old newspapers, magazines or letters. These paper fragments form the new material of the image, traces that are also a symbolic message future generations.”
He describes his work process as searching. “When I start working on a picture, I know what I don’t want. In the process, things appear that remind me of something, and I try to get rid of that reminder,” he describes. He says he experiences a unique feeling of concentration while creating. “I know from experience that a certain mental state that I experience while painting is in some mysterious way transferable to the viewer,” he adds.
The painting Dancers from 2023 was created by Daniel Pitín using oil, acrylic, glued paper, ash and pigments in an acrylic mixture on canvas. | Photo: Hunt Kastner Gallery
Daniel Pitín is one of the most popular and expensive Czech artists. The works from his exhibition in Berlin the year before last were sold before the opening, down to the last painting.
“Collectors pressure my galleries to send them photos of the works in advance. Those who know my work don’t need to see the painting physically anymore, so they reserve it before the exhibition even starts,” he explained to Forbes magazine. He also revealed the amounts that collectors spend on his works. “My largest canvases cost around twenty thousand euros, the smaller ones are between seven and ten thousand.”
Daniel Pitín’s largest paintings cost around 20,000 euros. | Photo: Radek Vebr
He is said not to be influenced by interest, he works at his own pace. He tries to bring something new with each exhibition. The insistence of collectors is said to be filtered by the galleries that represent him.
In addition to the solo exhibition at the Hunt Kastner gallery in Žižkov, some of his older paintings are currently on view at the Kampa Museum in an international group show called Preparing for Darkness.
Daniel Pitín graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he went through the studio of classical painting techniques of Zdenek Beran and the studio of conceptual work of Miloš Šejn. In 2019, Galerie Rudolfinum prepared his largest Czech exhibition called Paper Tower.
Exhibition
Exhibition
Daniel Pitín: Community of newcomers
Hunt Kastner Gallery, Prague, the exhibition will last until May 18.