Karel-Zlin. Confluences du Surrealisme. |
There is a more intimate and controlled dimension in his painting, which seems to shy away from the excesses of monumentality. Yet Karel-Zlin is the author of monumental works, of bronze sculptures suitable for open spaces and, for this, destined for public spaces. However, the same passion and references remain constant. One could say that the art of Karel-Zlin is a “timeless” art, which has crossed the second half of the 1900s keeping reference points constant: also within the changing styles from one phase to another of his production, there is a constant debt towards the traditions of Surrealism and Metaphysics. The works of De Chirico were a permanent light to look at. It is legitimate to believe that these works of Zlin, or surely some of his movements, would have been appreciated by Waldemar George, when he upheld that the future of modern art would be in the return to the classical and to a painting which sinks its roots in the Mediterranean. I believe above all that Karel-Zlin would not have been able to paint operas of this genre if from his native Moravia he hadn’t moved to Paris, or if he had not watched all that was done in Paris in the period between the two wars, even if his artistic experience has been executed from the second world war to the present. And yet, this clear and terse painting, made up of geometric elements, ovals, V-shaped angles, and a mass of fluctuating squares, organised with graphic paratactic elegance, would not be explained without that model, although transformed in a motif that aspires to geometric abstraction: it is a world of separate shapes and objects, collocated in its own dimension in absence of the force of gravity. But his route is long and complex, as was shown recently in the large anthological exhibition at the Gallery of Southern Bohemia in Hlubokà nal Vlatavou. In fact this exhibit was a real discovery to learn about the production of this painter so different from the exhibitions in Paris in 2009 and Milan in 2010. There one discovered a painter who had felt the influence of Pop Art, inserting photographs in his paintings, or repeating the same image in close sequence as if it were mass production. Subsequently, great structures of half-human half-plant stems were born, painted almost totally in black and white like drawings. Experiments which brought him to Dadaist accumulations of objects constructing scenographic boxes similar to certain designs as those of Kurt Schwitters. Already from these examples one is aware that Karel-Zlin has always been sensitive to how much more innovation the international avant-guarde produced: one has the impression that even the echoes of the Transavantguarde reached him. It is only with these premises, broken by a series of canvases of dark and mysterious bishops, worthy of the best Bacon, that we arrive to his most recent words, very close to a fictitious alchemic. The works of Zlin do not finish here and these first annotations are not enough to do justice to the variegated aspects of his works, in which the exotic elements and esoteric symbolisms are not secondary. It is in this key that his works are read. For example, his passion for Egypt, which is also at the centre of some poetry collections. He loves everything from the antique civilizations of the Nile, from the decorative value of the hieroglyphics to their more mysterious aspects. In some recent canvases, the enigma of the pictographs has begun and he has made this an abstract motif on the surface. To this, then, we must add his intense activity as an illustrator, with a prevalently figurative hallmark, made with thin pen ink. I was particularly struck, for example, when Zlin showed Stefano Cortina and I his illustrations for a Czech translation of Dino Buzzati’s Deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) serialised in a magazine in the mid-sixties: this was the reference that was missing to give a literary value to Zlin’s painting. His work, at least in certain declinations, seemed to be made to go with Buzzati’s story, which has restlessness and mystery in its prose. Zlin traces his figures with a single line, making them graceful, delicate figures, which appear to dance more than walk, moving themselves in space a if they were weightless. It is important to underline this aspect, because it is one of the characteristic strokes not only of his drawing, but also of that part of his pictorial production dedicated to mythological scenes and allegories: figures, here too, with a single line, or defined with a frugal chiaroscuro, often left at the drawing stage in contrast with the rest of the canvas: it is a technical device that, with other intentions, was suite also to the Surrealists’ work, and that De Chirico liked very much during his years in Paris; again, indirectly, we see new traces to understand what the French capital meant to the moulding of the Moravian painter. After all, almost all of Karel-Zlin’s painting is fundamental, with little colour, and which often and willingly becomes directly gouache on canvas or wood. In short, he continues to draw with a light trace of the brush, and he does it with a naturalness which has the trace of improvisation on the theme. It is in fact necessary to bear in mind that improvisation is possible thanks to a background of experience which make it emerge, when necessary, in aid of artistic creation. In this way, it is clearer to define the contours of the fictitious within which Karel-Zlin’s work moves: a world of geometric presences and floating figures, of symbols from more or less explicit meaning and of derivations from antiquity and mythology. At the heart, it is not even important to be able to decipher that complex of signs in code that fill these canvases. Instead it is more important how in the end this symbolic dimension envelops Zlin’s work with an antique aura, of an arcane memory, a totemic civilization. |