2024-03-10 20:51:17
On the picture of a bouquet displayed in a gallery in the center of Prague, the decal of the sole is clearly visible. But it’s not vandalism. “I step on it in different ways, I roll the canvases on the ground, I pour water on them,” explains artist Jakub Špaňhel. His latest works show that even rough treatment can achieve lightness.
One of the best-selling Czech painters, whose work was also acquired by the National Gallery, was always on the edge. This is also true today when he paints butterflies and flowers. “It leads to a nice, pleasant image. I try what is still bearable,” describes the forty-seven-year-old Spaniard, as he explores the boundaries of kitsch while creating in the studio. “It’s always a battle with the canvas and colors. I enjoy it, but at the same time it’s very nerve-wracking,” he admits.
He is currently exhibiting 24 paintings at Prague’s DSC Gallery, approximately half of which he completed this year. Most of them play with unusually bright tones for his conditions. The show called From my region will last until next Tuesday, March 12.
In recent years, the Spaniard has been gradually disassembling the motifs on which he has concentrated in the past decade. In his performance, the wings of butterflies act like flying decals of colored scales on canvas, water prints from a dream. Flowers can be recognized more by intuition. Some works are only a few strokes away from pure abstraction. The Spaniard excels in the art of hinting. He lets insects and plants dissolve into the void to make way for new themes. The current exhibition symbolizes the transition to the next creative stage.
The artist originally from Karviná plans to return to the gestural paintings of sacral architecture, with which he drew attention while still a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He graduated in 2001 with ten large-format canvases depicting temple interiors. That’s when he found his artistic language – figuratively speaking, he puts himself into the paintings, lets himself grow with them, just as they grow with the viewers. In the DSC gallery, he collected mostly medium format paintings, but they have a similar effect.
Brandl period
He started painting butterflies and flowers approximately ten years ago, when his children were born and he moved to Svaté Jan pod Skalou. He wanted to step out of the dark temples, he longed for light without the filter of stained glass.
Jakub Špaňhel moved to Svaté Jan pod Skalou about ten years ago. | Photo: Pepa Dvořáček
The miniature village embedded in the Bohemian Karst valley captivated him with the genius of loci and nature. The Spaniard himself then returned to his childhood. As a boy, he caught butterflies and bugs, kept lizards. But it was a long way from the Karvina block of flats to the countryside. “I was both an entomologist and a herpetologist. I dreamed of living in a house with a garden crawling with snakes,” he recalls when he was around ten years old. He transferred the collection of animals, insects and plants to canvases, he only paints what lives in his backyard.
Almost half of the paintings in the exhibition depict flowers. Perhaps most impressive are the three canvases in the middle room – namely Glass Vase, In the Studio and Against the Window. Scenes of abstracted flora are connected by distinctive pigments of blue, red, green and yellow.
Direct colors evoke the careful motifs of folklore costumes and ribbons, or detailed decors on porcelain. “On that glass vase, there really is a girl and a guy in costume. But I didn’t want to paint it there anymore,” he names the art of abbreviations. Above the vase hangs Jesus Christ on the cross. It is indicated by only a few strokes, yet it is clear at first glance.
For Špaňhel, the move to the village marked a noticeable turn in his life and work. “When I came from Karviná in the 1990s and joined the AVU, I had such a ‘Brandl period’. It lasted about fifteen years,” he says, referring to the recent exhibition The Story of the Bohemian, which presented the Baroque master Petr Brandl as a talented reveler.
Baroque is the closest of all styles to Špaňhel, rounded lines lend him well to painting. He visited the extremely successful retrospective at the Valdštejnská jízdárna twice. In addition to the life that Brandl led in the style of a rock star, he was attracted by the abundance of dark ultramarine, the most expensive color in the world, on the canvases.
“Brandl liked everything expensive. Expensive drink, expensive food and expensive colors,” he says of the pigment, whose price in 2000 was three times higher than gold. “It’s a ground gem. It was mainly used on the mantles of saints, it shines on the paintings. Brandl wanted to show off and applied it to the canvases in great quantities. He wanted to show that he could afford it,” explains the creator’s identification mark, who ended up in prison several times due to debts dungeons.
Jakub Špaňhel is currently setting up a studio in Venice, Italy, where he intends to paint. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
Made entirely of gold
What was darkly radiant and dark blue to Brandl, gold may be to the Spaniel. His manuscript belongs to studies. He applies it to rough canvases, the rawness of the fabric contrasts with fragile motifs.
While in the Baroque, gold represented the presence of God and the essence of the otherworldly, in Spaniel it functions as a flickering background of butterflies or just mood-creating spots.
Gold shines in Jakub Špaňhel’s new paintings. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
The artist also relates to childhood through the golden color. He remembers her from the flower shop in Ostrava where his grandmother worked. “Technically, it’s crushed bronze, they used it to make funeral wreaths. They had a rabbit’s paw that they used to stamp gold into obituaries. I had been painting since I was four years old and I really wanted to get my hands on that bronze. Then I was all golden,” he recalls. A fascination with flora can also be traced back to the flower shop, from which he equips large greenhouses.
The Spaniard claims that there is not much room for details in his sweeping works, but in the latest ones he completes the gestural painting with pigment sprinkled on the canvases. Colored powder can easily fall off – like the scales of butterfly wings or pollen from flowers. The paintings seem to come alive.
“But the bouquets come in second place anyway, it’s not really about them,” he thinks. “They are views into the studio. Views against the window, against the light,” he says and goes on to talk about his fascination with Josef Sudek. The leading Czech photographer of the 20th century, who is his lifelong role model, tamed the fleeting light, for example, in a series of pictures from invalid homes.
The Spaniard discovered a similar charm in churches. “When the light passes into the temple through the window, the dust looks like grains of gold.” As he says, he always “wanted to be a painter of light”.
Some of Jakub Špaňhel’s paintings are only a few strokes away from pure abstraction. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
The world came to me
His career was fundamentally influenced by three colleagues. Jiří David accepted him at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1995. “I owe him the fact that I even started,” recalls Špaňhel, how he moved to Prague at the age of 18.
A year later, Jiří Georg Dokoupil, a generation older exile, returned to the capital in style. In the Czech Republic, he paid for a world-class star, at the end of 1996 he simultaneously exhibited in the Rudolfinum Gallery and another Prague Gallery MXM, Olomouc’s Caesar and Ostrava’s 761. They were introduced by Vilém Kabzan, Dokoupil’s cousin and Špaňhel’s classmate at the time. “People go to internships, this internship came to me,” he describes how they caught each other’s eye.
Dokoupil told him about meetings with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, whom he met personally in New York. But even more important was Dokoupil’s greatness and pace, which in many ways exceeded the rhythm of the domestic scene.
“Interesting people from all over the world came to his studio. We rented three halls on Wenceslas Square, a total of one square kilometer. That was not common at the time. I only knew those small Czech studios where there was a couch and then nothing. We did everything in a big way,” recalls Špaňhel about this “practical academy”.
The triumvirate of mentors is completed by Milan Knížák, in whose studio he completed his schooling. “Of all the roles he held, the professorship was the happiest. The prince can recognize a problem in a picture and explain it simply.” It was during discussions with the later head of the National Gallery, Knížák, that the topic of the interiors of sacred buildings arose. “I think I was the first to say it, Knížák claims he came up with it. But we’re both satisfied.”
The Spaniard now wants to return to the formative subject after twenty years. In November, he rented a studio in Venice, Italy, which he is currently furnishing. “I haven’t painted there yet, I just slept there for a week at the end of the year,” he recounts.
The exhibition of works by Jakub Špaňhel will last in Prague’s DSC Gallery until next Tuesday, March 12. | Photo: Vojtěch Veškrna
He chose the venue of the world-famous art biennial thanks to history. He doesn’t notice the tourism there, he avoids the crowds in the side streets. Of all the cities, he paints Venice the best. “For example, I don’t like New York at all. I don’t like modern boxes. They’re angular and I can’t draw a straight line,” he says.
He has already created a few “straight” buildings, for example the building of the Central Bank of the Republic of Azerbaijan in 2008. Fluffy historical styles suit him best. “Everything is crooked in Venice. I like patina, I collect old furniture, old folk art. And everything is old there. I’m looking forward to the renaissance there, I haven’t painted much here yet,” Jakub Špaňhel foreshadows future trips to the south and a return to the darkened churches.