Collaboration between the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín and the painter Oldřich Tichý, who was born in Zlín, dates from the end of the 1980s, when the gallery acquired one of Tichý’s key early works, I Run in the Fields (1989). In 1993 it was one of the first state-run galleries in the Czech Republic to hold an exhibition of Tichý’s paintings.1 Since then Tichý’s work has appeared regularly in the gallery’s permanent exhibition of twentieth-century Czech art, and in all major group exhibitions and exhibitions of contemporary Czech art that the gallery has held, especially the New Zlín Salon exhibitions.2 All of that collaboration has now logically resulted in an extensive retrospective exhibition of Tichý’s work, including many of his key works from 1980–2006.3 In addition to paintings, there are also less well-known objects from 1995, which are very important in the context of his work. However, when planning the exhibition the main emphasis has been on his remarkable work from recent years, represented at the exhibition by his major paintings and a smaller collection of contemporary works on paper, which are not included in the catalogue.
Oldřich Tichý is one of the artists who appeared on the Czech art scene in the 1980s, one of a generation of artists in which the ambitious members of the Tvrdohlaví group were prominent during the years of totalitarianism. They were not however the only ones; their uniquely direct path to the art scene was provocative at the time, but there were other artists working in isolation who rose to prominence without being part of a collective, artists who were more inward-looking, and often displayed a respect for the art of earlier generations, and for nature and the mysterious aspects of human existence. That characterises the life and art of Oldřich Tichý, who went from the Zlín region to study in Prague in 1980, after attending the The Secondary School of Applied Art in Uherské Hradiště and spending two years working as an art therapist at a psychiatric hospital in Kroměříž. However, the situation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the 1980s, and the studio of Professor František Jiroudek, did not conform to Tichý’s ideas on how art should be studied, something he was preoccupied with at the time. The young artist’s attempts to arrive at an individual conception for his art, which was now emerging in his first significant paintings, contrasted substantially with ideas on teaching at the Academy, and differed entirely from the paintings of his professor. However, despite those difficulties, Oldřich Tichý was able to devote himself to his art with his characteristic tenacity.4 Initially he continued working on expressive figurative compositions in the style of Rouault, inspired by his experience of working at the psychiatric hospital. Those works indicate his interest at the time in extreme mental states. A certain shift in his ideas is evident in his imaginative still lifes (1986–87), which verge on the abstract, and despite continuing with a great number of forms and dynamic brushwork, they established a trend towards the clarification of forms, making them monumental and crystalline, which was important for subsequent developments in his painting. We can date the beginning of Tichý’s life as an artist to around 1980. Around 1983, new themes appear in his work (Morning, Wedding . . .), and his style becomes more relaxed. The first still lifes from his studio (1986) are painted in a similar style, but, with the emphasis on the constructive aspect of forms, the still lifes are gradually transformed from detailed studies into more general forms, and in accordance with that the colour aspects of a composition become more important. It is an imaginative plastic and spatial conception of abstract subject matter, free of illusory direct ties to the outer world. Those still lifes (1987) are now entirely autonomous, independent of visual reality, emancipated and purely aesthetic entities with psychological significance, and their poetry draws on symbolism of an existential scope (Memory of Childhood, In the Same Boat — both 1987).
That entire introductory period, the search for a form in painting that corresponded to the artist’s nature, came to fruition in 1988–89. A more or less straight line leads from the paintings he produced at that time to his present compositions, with the essential diversions resulting from the broad scope and exploratory nature of his work. In 1988 Tichý painted a series of canvasses based on a direct conception of themes drawn from objective and natural phenomena in the external world. The surreal, expressionist syntheses of his earlier abstract compositions, reminiscent of František Janoušek, were greatly transformed by this new approach to inner and outer reality. There are paintings with powerful details and symbols from the visual world, which are simultaneously, in the choice and way of seeing the motif, attributes of man’s presence in that world. They are the currency of the artist’s existential experience of the world, in the profundity of its duration, its immutability, and in the open dynamism of the phenomena of life and art, cosmic events and the rhythms of nature. These robust, colourful and masterfully executed forms from the real world are an integral part of the imaginary space of a painting, with which they comprise a unity, a polyphonic archetype of symbolist scope, with layers of meaning. That can clearly be seen in compositions such as I Live Alone in the Woods Here (1988), I Run in the Fields (1989), and I am House and Tree (1989), in which the intuitive search for identity and the natural order of man and nature in the pragmatic world of post-industrial civilisation and the increasing atomisation of human existence are magnified by the artist’s distinctive personalisation of the motif, his “essentially personal themes”.
Tichý continued to work on those subjects for the following decade. His quest for a more profound and more powerful expression of his essential themes and the general psychological themes of the time led him to pay greater attention to the formal aspects of painting, which later resulted
in clearly formulated compositions, alongside the colouristic aspects of his style, and in inventive work with surface and space. In addition to the traditional themes from his earlier period, this new trend brought a number of entirely new motifs and motivations to his work. Particularly important in that respect is a series of paintings with titles that are characteristically psychological, but also based on space and subject matter: Window and Window into You (1994). 1995 was however an exceptional year in Tichý’s work, during which he produced an entire series of hanging objects (Gate, Wind, Closed for Eternity). They are in essence utilitarian objects associated with traditional rural life and work, but he has elevated them, without significant formal alterations, to the level of art. Those objects are an expression and symbol of the artist’s close ties to nature and the countryside, where he now lives, but they also in some sense conclude the preceding chapter in his work, and anticipate his paintings in the years that followed.
That is evident in canvasses such as Hiding Places (1998), or a series of paintings of windows, from Window into You V (1995) to Window (2001). The personification of the objective aspects of existence lends greater significance to the duality of the conception of the motifs depicted, which is particularly powerful in paintings from recent years, and in his current work. The theme of the duality of the inner (spiritual) and outer (atomised, material) worlds is captured in a remarkable organic unity with all of his earlier work. In Oldřich Tichý’s paintings, Me and You, reminiscent of Buber’s I and Thou, is not just the title of a specific painting (2006), which is included in the exhibition, but it has a more general validity in the context of his oeuvre as a whole.5 That “philosophical” theme is present in a particularly clear form in Tichý’s current work. One of the typical compositions produced in that spirit is A Path in the Labyrinth (2001–06), where “Me” — a clear element in the form of a massive and illusive wooden cross, depicted in a diagonal (dramatisation) in the foreground, while the background is chaotically abstract, some kind of symbol of the outer world, an attribute of chaos or of atomised existence. The cross as a symbol of man (the human figure) is the main subject of another important painting, Lying (2004). In that painting, the background is a relatively tranquil unified field, compact in its colour and form. There are other remarkable compositions, based on a spatial two-dimensionality, which draw on the tension between the specific and the indefinite (or abstract), such as Just above the earth in one move (2005), or paintings evoking an existential, poetic perception of the world (There, behind you, is the night, 2002, Two Angels, 2005). Night (2006) is another of Tichý’s current paintings that use an abstract form to present a kind of Baroquely spiritual experience of the eternal, which is inherent in the artist’s approach to the world, albeit one censured by the pragmatism of contemporary attitudes to life. It is evident that painting has become for him a crucial device for essential communication. With his intense vision of the theme, he presents what a casual glance does not reveal, yet which exists as something that is central: the spiritual substance of our lives, the fundamental integrating element of human existence.
1 oldřich tichý, Paintings, Zlín State Gallery, foyer of Zlín Theatre, 1993 (introduction in the catalogue by Jana Šálková).
2 In addition to exhibitions of new acquisitions and various permanent exhibitions at the gallery, Oldřich Tichý’s work was included in the exhibition Contemporary Art — The 90s in the Zlín House of Arts, held by the Zlín State Gallery in 1995, and at all four triennial New Zlín Salon exhibitions (1996, 1999, 2002, 2005).
3 Several important works, especially earlier works, are at present out of the artist’s reach, for the most part in private collections abroad, and therefore could not be included in the exhibition.
4 The atmosphere at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the 1980s was evidently none too liberal. Oldřich Tichý recalls his studies there disdainfully: “I began with figures, and by the fourth year I was painting abstract paintings. The teaching staff didn’t like that much, so they made me do the classic disciplines — the nude, the portrait, the landscape and the still life, which I ultimately chose for my subsequent work . . .”.
There are no accidents, an interview with oldřich tichý by radan wagner in Já a Ty. Katalog výstavy Oldřicha Tichého, Galerie Václava Špály v Praze, 1993.
5 In 2003 the most important exhibition of Tichý’s work was held under the title Me and You at the Václav Špála Gallery in Prague. See note no. 4.
When a pilgrim sets out on a lonely journey to understand the world he is leaving behind, after some time he is sure to realise that he is not only travelling through the world, but is also on another journey no less real, a journey through himself to himself. This journey is unpredictable, but it holds the promise of finding, in solitude, an understanding of the world from which the wanderer is becoming more distant while simultaneously immersing himself in it. Patiently, receptively, he waits to see what he will find, what he will see on his journey through the landscape, through space and time, deep in the forest and deep within.
This journey, this working our way through the world, is captured in Oldřich Tichý’s painting Deep in the Forest (2012). In the multidimensional brown-tinted half-light of the forest a strange object levitates, hard to identify — an ethereal symbol, a message perhaps? As though it has travelled through time from long ago. Yet evidently it is made of materials from this world, entirely tangible sticks and twigs and sharp thorns. Is it a relic of the primitive — meaning original, primordial — lives of the forest’s ancient inhabitants? Is it a symbol of human suffering, of poignancy or failure? There is clearly an awareness here of our continuity with everything in the past that has formed us for eternity, and which new generations sometimes proudly, but in vain, disdain. From all of his work to date it is evident that Oldřich Tichý understands and attends to these links with the depths of time, as they resonate in the most ordinary materials, and in things perhaps cast aside, and in aspects of our routine experience of the world that we do not ordinarily remember.
“Primitive” materials, the primary, primordial materials of man’s embracing of the world, have appeared in all of Oldřich Tichý’s work. He knows that stone, wood, clay and sticks, materials that have been reused many times, connect man to the earth, to nature in the most authentic sense, with an all-surpassing power and strength. And they also connect him to his most elemental human destiny.
The early phase of Oldřich Tichý’s art is bound up with the new vitality of the mid-1980s, when a new generation of artists became highly visible on the Czech art scene, at a number of exhibitions held — as had become common after 1968 — at a wide variety of unorthodox locations outside traditional exhibition venues, and as in the 1960s, these exhibitions were again called Confrontations. Some artists from the new generation were convinced that it was essential to entirely reject what they saw as the introverted Czech art scene at this time, which they thought had failed to respond to the challenges of the modern world; in fact a sizeable faction from this generation felt that it was unacceptable to place their art within the broader Czech tradition. Instead these artists focused on the latest trends in European and world art, and the arrival of postmodernism on the Czech art scene is generally associated with this generation.
Of course postmodernism had not been entirely unknown here in the early 1980s, as is evident in the work of the preceding generation of artists. In retrospect it is clear that the most authentic work by the 1980s generation never entirely abandoned the artists’ formative Czech environment. This does not detract in any way from the freshness and innovativeness of this young generation, and this does not apply only to those artists who were most visible on the art scene, but also to a very broad range of original and individual agendas. It is typical of the Czech art scene that not even a radical rejection of the domestic tradition could ultimately result in a rigid distance from traditional art, whose output is a work that lasts: a painting, sculpture or object. This kind of distance has only been introduced recently by much younger artists and curators on the increasingly fragmented art scene.
In the mid-1980s Oldřich Tichý was one of those artists who did not seek to break all ties with the domestic tradition in painting. His work has developed in way that is not speculative and is seemingly quite natural, and this may be related to his formative intimate experiences from a childhood spent on the hills around the small village of Tichov, where he decided at an early age to be a painter: from his experiences of wide open space, the lofty sky, the roughness of stone, the softness and hardness of the ground and the strength and suppleness of wood, the endless flowing of air and water, and birds in flight. It is as though he received some kind of cumulative, almost prehistoric experience of the elements that have always made up the world: earth, fire, water, air. Oldřich Tichý never had to fundamentally question the purpose of painting, the meaning and vitality of the picture, because painting allowed him to express his wonder at how the things of the world are, and allowed him to share his understanding of the basic, simplest things of human existence in a world not obscured by the convenience of the technological rationality of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nothing in this understanding of art is not contemporary; on the contrary, it demonstrates the continued relevance of a personal quest for the foundations of the world, foundations not disguised by the buzz of colourful utilitarian everyday life: the foundations of human existence. And here any verbal fears over the currency of the formal devices that precede the creative act itself are entirely misplaced.
The distinctiveness and independence of Oldřich Tichý’s ideas on painting were plain to see in his early work, remarkable still lifes in which complex assortments of ordinary, mostly discarded things reconfigured their place in the order of the world, and thereby transformed their purpose and their mysterious hidden meanings. In later work they emerged again and became separate, so that they were no longer just things among other utilitarian things, or something even less — so that they were not just items intended for consumption, but had the power to denote, signify, symbolise and indicate. It was as if Oldřich Tichý had been quick to realise what a Czech philosopher once said: that a painting does not argue, but shows. The colours and forms, and the things emerging from them, had become symbols, references that cannot of course be found in any manual of the history of art; symbols that have no direct verbal equivalent, but possess a great emotive power that opens the way to understanding. In his hands what were originally utilitarian things made of the materials available in the countryside, wood and mostly corroded iron, became symbols of something fundamental that is constantly veiled by technological civilisation, where the experience of the world has been replaced by a torrent of digital information.
What Oldřich Tichý sensed in his early paintings about the expanse of earth that is our world, where there were tangles of transforming, once determinable forms of things, was revealed and confirmed in a new perspective by living outside the increasingly convoluted and dissociated functioning of the big city, in a landscape still insulated, almost forgotten, where one can sense the immediacy of touch, where one can say “You”. Time and space began to open up to him in a different way, as did the substantiality and weight, the insubstantiality and lightness of what was near and far. Oldřich Tichý continues to seek a place that opens up space; he talks with space through things that are in fact space seen differently, for in creation space and things are of the same order.
In all of this, it must be emphasised that Oldřich Tichý is a painter whose way of thinking about the world is the process of painting itself. It is as though the inevitability of the process of the creating of a painting demonstrates that the primary reason is not the creation of an end product, a work that lasts, but painting as a process in which the original flicker of sudden seeing and understanding is reborn, and it can be captured, and therefore communicated, in a painting. The symbolic aspect of Oldřich Tichý’s paintings is not only encoded in the familiarity of a form that produces associations, but in the method of painting, in the use of the paint, its limpidity speaking of light, energy and weightlessness, or its thickness indicating the heaviness and density of matter, which is, however, another form of the same thing, energy. In painting the heavy matter of the world can become insubstantial, or a blue sky can assume mass to the point of collapse. Tichý’s paintings show that the world hides unknown energies that can suddenly speak out against everything we have become accustomed to. As Roger Munier wrote: “The invisible is in the visible. It addresses us when the visible talks to us, challenges us as if by itself and without reason”.
Oldřich Tichý works with a visualisation of three dimensions, and if objects appear in his paintings, then they seem to be things taken from daily life, most probably rural life, or they are strange objects of uncertain origin and purpose. But all emerge from space, and in their three-dimensionality they reveal a space that is no longer the single-perspective space once construed by the modern age, but a space that has a fourth dimension, time. Tichý’s picture space is closest to what physics calls the space-time continuum.
In one phase of Tichý’s art his interest in the corporeal substance of things, their ability to demarcate and define a place, clarify it and state its coordinates, took precedence over painting, and he investigated it by producing three-dimensional objects. These too were made out of everyday materials, the torsos of things no longer useful or functional, and whose original purpose was frequently uncertain. These were not the various kinds of objects we know from European modernism, imitating machines and suggesting some kind of functionality. They were just as mysterious as Tichý’s still lifes of strange things, or paintings of relics of what may once have been useful things from rural life, witnesses to human fates. Tichý’s experience with these three-dimensional works was projected into his subsequent paintings.
Today it is increasingly clear that Oldřich Tichý is following his own path, where his latest work has always reinterpreted his earlier work. Today painting remains the most powerful medium for him to express the question raised over and over of what it means to be in a world that does not stand firmly before us but is constantly coming into being. This is apparent in number of aspects that characterise his current paintings.
There is an expanding series of paintings of massive, solitary objects sticking out menacingly against a darkening evening sky, suggesting what may be pre-Christian idols made of rough or timeworn pieces of wood on which no traces of being worked by human hand can now be seen. Perhaps they tell a story, and we are vexed that we find it so hard to decipher. Yet there is still a great urgency about them. Other objects may perhaps be the discarded relics of wooden stations of the cross, or fragments of what were once useful artefacts, or perhaps just discarded materials gnawed by time. Whatever they may be, these are traces of many lives seen in all their rawness, and which remain with us. They are witnesses. In forms reduced to essence these paintings are clearly related to the themes and forms Tichý has explored to date. It is still fascinating to see how Tichý seizes on things that are ordinary, worthless, even ugly, things set aside somewhere or thrown away, and transforms them in his paintings into insistent witnesses to reality.
In Tichý’s current work there is an exceptionally powerful group of paintings that emphasise a certain fragility or even ethereality of objects that are evidently made of natural materials, probably wood, and these objects emerge and levitate in a multidimensional space. Despite all their realism they are as mysterious as the biblical writing on the wall: Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin . . . Prehistoric objects, structures or shelters made of sticks and thorns, probably not so much to protect as to deter. Clearly these objects are not entirely natural, and have been made by someone’s hand. Do they fence off sacred places where no one may venture, under threat of punishment by some terrible god? Or are they caskets or cases for the sacred objects of some unknown cult? These seemingly disorganised, tangled constructions reflect the complexity and unfathomability of our world. Anyone who reaches out to try and make of these objects something utilitarian will only be harmed. In some paintings there are structures woven from twigs, rope and wire, such as The Mesh of Days (2012), which separates us from the unknown space “beyond” the space we see, but from the perspective of the mesh of our own ordinary days we still do not understand it very well. A painting with the uninformative title Ladders and Wires (2012) presents an even more complex and extraordinary lattice. These fragile ladders and wires will not support a human being, and yet the network woven from them keeps people out. Is this an image of the web of our previous actions, or perhaps of human limits, our own frailty, the limits of our earthly existence? Related to these works are other paintings with natural, mostly oval structures made from some thorny shrub; they are strongly reminiscent of some kind of wooden material rolling freely over the world’s plains. Perhaps this is poterium spinosum, the thorny burnet, which flourishes in Palestine, and these bundles will be burnt to stave off the cold night. It would have been ideal for weaving a crown of thorns. Or perhaps it is another plant, the rose of Jericho, also known as the resurrection plant, which dried out and curled up is driven by the wind over the dusty wilderness, seeking a place with moisture where it can put down roots and come back to life.
The urgency and power of Oldřich Tichý’s paintings, which may produce in the mind of the viewer the connotations I have mentioned — connotations that emerge quite naturally in the cultural and religious traditions of Europe, primarily address the viewer’s ability to accept the autonomy of the painting, and to experience what is seen, rather than the viewer’s memory or mere erudition stored in words. “A painting is [. . .] what allows reality to be seen. . . . So for us to see, we need paintings” (Miroslav Petříček).
The striking authenticity of Tichý’s work stands out from contemporary Czech fine art in the profound emotional element of the experiencing of the world, the experience of touching its immediate materiality. “. . . Experience therefore has to have the character of a process, in which reality can speak, and we acquire the ability to understand what it tells us, and how it approaches us” (Antonín Mokrejš). Oldřich Tichý’s art, his discourse on reality, the world and his role in it, is guided by his ability to understand and make visible in his paintings what reality tells us, and how it approaches us. Tichý has understood that even in what is smallest and closest to hand we have an opportunity to understand the metaphysical dimension of our lives.
