| Petr Schlosser (1945 - Londen) | Mail voor nadere informatie |
| Door Marcel Van Jole - Vice-voorzitter AICA Petr Schlosser, geboren uit Tsjechische ouders, verhuist als baby naar Praag. Onder de knoet van het communistisch regime mocht de jonge Petr, een nochtans voor beeldende kunst begaafde student niet naar de kunstacademie, maar moest willens nillens publiciteitstekenaar worden. Na de Russische overrompeling en bezetting in 1968 vlucht hij aan “West” en woont sinds dien in Belgie… Eens terug in de vrije wereld kan hij zich uitleven als beeldend kunstenaar. Dat hij de verworvenheden van publiciteitstekenaar, toch nog herhaaldelijk gebruik maakt, ligt voor de hand. Hij heeft o.m. prachtige affiches in Engeland ontworpen. Petr Schlosser bewondert Hans Holbein, Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Vermeer, Gustav Klimt, Picasso, Balthus, allen schitterende tekenaars en schilders, ze hebben zijn visueel geheugen veroverd, ze sporen hem aan tot hommageschilderijen. Met zijn bijna proverbiale schuchterheid tracht hij toch in de psyche van zijn gekozen personages binnen te dringen, de boodschap te vatten, van hun technisch vermogen (en hiervan te leren). Hij bouwt in zijn werken vaak een dubbele bodem in, een gezonde ironie is nooit ver weg. Trachten we de artiest te volgen in de conceptie van zijn oeuvre. Zijn voornaamste bekommernis is van zuiver esthetische van aard, het startidee is enkel een pretext. Hier citter ik graag een uittreksel van wat hij me lang geleden schreef en wat me nog steeds zeer verhelderend lijkt “Dank zij een Picasso die zijn lang en bijzonder vruchtbaar leven, ook door al zijn verchillende periodes heen, steeds beelden gebruikt heeft die clichés geworden waren, zo houd ook ik ervan beelden te zien et te schilderen die ik reeds gezien heb. Ik houd van deze “clichés” waarvan het bestaan mij door hun eenvoud zekerheid biedt en waarvan de herhaling getuigt van hun noodzaak en hun bestaanszin. Dus ben ik niet de enige om van zulke beelden te houden en ik verheug mij erover dat populaire beelden steeds meer hedendaags worden dank zij het talent een ok dank zij de intelligentie van de kunstenaars….” Het oeuvre dat hij speciaal voor Brusselse luchthaven ontwierp is vierkant, een geometrische vorm die hem bijzonder goed ligt, het brengt de geschiedenis van de luchtvaaart onder vorm van het citeren van de pioniers. Hij doet dit me letters in relief, zeer harmonisch uitgebeeld, een staaltje van zijn grafisch vermogen. Aan de boorden van het werk bracht hij kleine schilderijtjes aan die, zeer figuratief, gezichten tonen van mogelijke passagiers uit de vijf werelddelen, allen me de blik op de hemel gericht. Ik noem het een psycho-plastisch oeuvre want het suggereert duidelijk zijn psyche en dat is in de ruime zin “geest”, maar ook levenskracht en “plastos” verwant het met het oud-Griekse werkwoord “plassein” met als betekenissen o.m. “vormen” en “zich een voortelling maken” (van de levenskracht). Petr Schlosser bevraagt en onderzoekt de kunst, zijn kunst. Hij zoekt naar uitgebalanceerde harmonie, een sublimatie van krachten, een synthese van spanningen. Opleiding Akademie für Angewandte Kunst - Wien, Oosterijk L’ academie Royale des beaux arts - Tournai, België /Prix de Bicentennaire/ Akademie voor beeldede kunsten – Antwerpen Berchem, België Tentoonstellingen 1963 / 2007 {selectie) Galerij Klaxon – Praag, Tsjechoslovakije Halle aux Draps – Tournai, België Galerij Cercle Artistique – Tournai, België Chateau de Diegem – Zaventem, België Theatre de Parvis – Brussel, België Galerij Romi Goldmuntz – Antwerpen, België Galerij Regard 17 – Brussel, België Galerij Israel Linke – Amsterdam, Netherlands Galerie Mayaert – Oostende, België Galerij L´Angle Aigu – Brussel, België Galerij H – Knokke-Heist, België Permanence Guy Peeters – Knokke-Heist, België Barbara Tamerin Fine Arts – New York, USA Christel Richards Gallery – New York, USA KultCentrum Rix – Deurne, België Galerij L´Escaliers – Brussel, België Galerij Tilbury – St. Truiden, België Athena Publishers Gallery – London, G.B. Kultureel Centrum A.Spinnoy – Mechelen, België Galerij Campo&Campo – Antwerpen, België Galerij Sept – Nice, Frankrijk Kultureel Centrum v. Tsjech Republiek – Brussel, België Galerij Ledeburg – Praag, Tsjechie La Colombe d´Or Gallery – Houston, USA Groeps-tentoontstellingen in België, Frankrijk, USA, Monaco Verzamelingen van Belgische staat, Diverse instituties in België inkl. Nationaal Luchthaven, Brussel, Ziekenhuis Middelheim, Antwerpen Museu de Bellas Artes – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil University of Greater Victoria – Canada University Freedonia State – USA Born in England in 1945, his parents were Czech refugees and after the war they moved back to Prague. Under the yoke of the communist regime young Petr, though gifted for visual arts, was not allowed to study at the Academy of Arts and had no other choice than to settle for a mere professional training. After the Soviet invasion of the Prague spring and the following occupation of the country he fled to Vienna where he studied for couple of semesters in Akademie fur Angewandte Kunst and than he received a scholarship in Belgium and since 1971 has lived in Antwerp. Back in the free world, he can do his own thing as a visual artist. He utilizes everything he has acquired in the world of advertising – for example he created a series of beautiful posters in the UK. Schlosser loves the freedom in the squareness of classical drawings; he admires Holbein, Flemish masters, da Vinci, Durer, Rembrandt – all brilliant draughtsmen… They have conquered his visual memory urging him to include a homage in his paintings. In spite of his almost proverbial shyness, he tries to communicate, to penetrate into the psyche of his personages in order to decipher their message, to learn from their capacities. In his work he often builds a kind of windows with double bottom - you can quite often catch a glimpse of amused irony that's waiting just round the corner. If you try to follow the artist in the conception of his oeuvre you notice his most important concern is purely aestethic, the starting point is merely a pretext. I dare to define his work as „psychoplastic“, because „psyche“, in the broadest sense mind, but in a narrower sense also vital power, is always clearly present, as well as „plastos“ related to the ancient Greek word „plassein“ meaning form and making the representation. By psycho-plastic I mean making a representation of the vitality or forming in the mind. His paintings show distinctly a strong vital power, but at the same time they propose to see images, formed in the mind as they do not exist in every day’s reality. Petr Schlosser thinks the creativity is an adventure which justifies his human existence. Silently he makes inquiries about Art and he permanently investigates his own. He seeks and probably finds an equilibrated harmony, a sublimination, a synthesis. Marcel van Jole Vice-president of International Assoc. of Art Critics A Talk with Petr Schlosser AS: Petr, when we last saw each other, 19 years ago I think it was, in Antwerp, you urged me to visit Gutenberg's workshop. I did, and found it fascinating. Does Gutenberg have any special meaning to you other than the fact that he provided you with a place to steer tourists? PS: did I really send you there? I´m confused, is there is any Gutenberg workshop in Antwerp? Oh, it must be The Plantin and Moretus House... a real palace built by clever people who understood how to exploit somebody else‘s invention, in this case Gutenberg´s. Nevertheless, that place is one of my favorites in the town, it´s beautiful and quiet, and, if you have an obsession with graphic arts as I have, you can see there on several floors how they handled printing then. They had a monopoly in printing the Bible in all possible languages and became the richest and most influential people in the whole town, if not the kingdom. But on other hand, they asked the artists to design new fonts, even Pieter Paul Rubens got a job in illustration. I have always liked the links between art and its technological applications—and vice-versa. And if you don‘t care about that, you can still admire how they could manage to sleep in such small beds. AS: Tell me about Howard Hughes. I was surprised when you wrote that you planned a series of paintings based on his life. I wouldn't have guessed this would be your subject matter. But you seemed very enthusiastic. PS: Wow, H.H.!!! The man who could be a king! What a subject, what a story! A comedy, a tragedy... Shakespearian! And to think that nowadays all that remains of his extraordinary life in the general subconcious, thanks to a "reincarnation" sequence of Mr. Burns in "The Simpsons", is a caricature of a man completely not-of-this-world. Obviously I had heard about H.H. here and there. At first, some 40 years ago, I confused him with Howard Hawks, but in a book about the Western, I learned that he fired himself, and, even if I had just started to try to read in English, I saw that the spelling is different and concluded that they must be then two different people. In fact it took me several years before I understood that the man in autosecestration in Las Vegas in the 60‘s, the one who draw the bra for Jane Russell in the 30‘s, the one who developed that beauty of an airplane, the Constellation, in 40‘s, became afraid of communism and bacteria in the 50‘s, and between bought TWA, not to mention all the ladies he lured to RKO, get wire-tapped by the CIA, suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and so on—that all of those Howard Hugheses were one and the same person. I had always lived with the supposition that if there are plenty of J. Smiths, J. Bushes,. J.Novaks, why not a number of H.H‘s?!?! Finally, a little bit like Salvador Dali in the Perpignan railstation, I got the revelation in the spring of 1976 on the tube in London, which drove me from Harrow to Edgware Road and where I found a copy of Newsweek with at least 12 pages ( with illustrations!!!) about the sad end of this multiple genius! And I was really, really puzzled!!! You could say that in his persona he reunited all the Jules Verne characters, good and bad, in one pair of shoes.... My favorite one, just before the one who f... them all, is for sure the one linked with aviation! I will never forget the intense pleasure (should I say "libido"? ) of the very young boy, which I was once, living in a Prague suburb, not far from the Ruzyne Airport and waiting for the weekly arrival of the Air France or Air India Constellation. But believe me, it was never an obsession—I was just very, very amazed and intrigued, not more and not less than with, let‘s´say, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Churchill or Kafka. A good company, by the way ! And when at the end of last year my friend and colleague painter Guy Van den Bulcke invited me to participate in a group exhibition with him in Houston, I said, more as a joke than seriously, "How could I show my "European" paintings with their "Rembrandtesques" reminiscencies in H.H´s native town ?" He answered, "Paint him !" in imitation of H.H.´s famous "Paint it" command while visiting RKO Studios. And then he told Steven Zimmerman, the director of the La Colombe d´Or Gallery, that I´m already busy with the subject ! Well, since then, I have read something like 1000 pages of different biographies and I really, but really, have a huge respect for the man. I think that he could do what ever he wanted; he tried and succeeded in a lot of domaines; he lived literally several lives. Did he achieve happiness here and there with his strange character? I wonder... This is an American story, and how ! But is it paintable? I tried, and I would like to have had more time for it, but just one hour ago a truck come and took Hugheses and Rembrandts to the boat for a ride accross the Atlantic.... AS: You’ve talked of Hughes’s character and biography; any thoughts about his face? PS: I'm going to answer your question in general terms. While I’m considering all the changes in one man’s face—recently HH—thru the different periods of his life, trying to learn something more about him, with today’s arrest of Saddam (congratulations!), I’m struck by parallels and similarities in their courses—the story of rise and fall obviously, their behavior, and probably many others. But what really amazes me is the presence of a moustache on both faces—a distinct sign of egocentrism, if ever there was one... and then of the beard when in decline. Can you imagine someone really concerned with his appearance, taking pains every morning to shave and then to carve this horrid product of hair bulbs under the skin so as to look in accord with some "virile" image he wants to show? Kaiser Wilhelm, Hindenburg, Hitler, Stalin, Chamberlain, Laval, Petain, Franco, Hughes, Foster Dulles and nearly everyone in those times passed daily lot of time at looking themselves in the mirror! Often, I suppose, because of violent circumstances, many of them did not have time to grow a beard, but once in depression or in hiding, they did—just passing through my silly mind my current favorites, Howard and Saddam, and why not Hemingway. I didn’t push reflection further to find other examples. Of course, on the opposite side you might find Schweitzer, Einstein, France, Masaryk, Twain…. Somebody clever could write a bestseller of 900 pages and win a Pulitzer with such a subject! AS: Do you find that there exist some subjects that you'd like to paint but somehow can't? If so, what makes them different from the subjects with which you feel you can really come to grips? PS: Maybe you´ll laugh—a landscape! And do you know why? Because I´m not quite a good painter... and I´m very sorry about it, mainly for myself. Nature is so perfect by her own means, and more and more distant from us after all the beating we‘ve inflicted on her, that she doesn‘t reveal herself anymore; she is in hiding. We live outside her, probably in guilt. Here and there I dare to use a "botanical" detail, the branch of an appletree, leaves, herbs... and I´m stunned by their somehow internal logic, the absolute grace and fullnes of the proposed forms—even the empty space between the different elements is gratifying and you can have the same impression of accomplishment when you look with your nose against a few stalks of grass as when you look at an entire forest. But somehaw it is not in our culture anymore to live in harmony and respect with that distant thing. And the truth is that we will be unable, I mean myself and you most probably also, to spend a day, a night, a week on our own there. We are not Orientals, we are not Japanese. That´s the trouble. From that point of view, everything else appears as seizable. AS: Your taste, from things you’ve told me in the past, seems to be quite eclectic. It's my impression that, in music, two of your favorites are Ella Fitzgerald and Leos Janacek. Is there something particularly Czech in that combination? And is whatever underlies it reflected in your art? Finally, curiosity (and the fact that you’ve mentioned Ella Fitzgerald) drives me to ask: how do you feel about Billie Holiday? PS: Ella and Janacek—It might appear as a paradox, but it is not. To be an "artist" doesn’t mean that one has a more or less encyclopedic knowledge of all the arts and must love them. But with music this is, without doubt, a little bit different! If there is an art you just cannot ignore or even, ad absurdum, imagine its disappearance, that’s music! Any kind of music and for everybody! Aber achtung! One of my friends, a very good amateur classical guitar player, told me recently how, in the ‘50s, he heard at a party, between the pieces of Django and Grapelli, Bill Haley´s “Rock Around the Clock" and ran away, horrified and crying, and when his mother asked him what happened, he just endlessly shouted "They’ve won, they’ve won!!!!" That’s the trouble with musicians, they are very often sectarians, probably much, much more than visual plasticians are. My father, first name Wolfgang (you may guess why…) played, in that blessed time between the two wars, every Sunday on a Stradivarius cello in a family quintet (once even with von Zemlinsky as a special guest, I have still a photograph somewhere), paid for my piano lessons since age 5, and my lovely mother took me to the Opera every time she could. They literally fed me with music. I most probably didn’t have a particular talent, so, thanks to the almighty, I didn’t become a musician and I didn’t suffer too much when rock-and-roll struck. And, in fact, I quite liked it; it also came straight from America. I hope you are not spitting in disgust! Should I really explain to you how it was, to put the things in some kind of context then, in 1956 with Hungary, Berlin and later, in the ‘60s...everything American was just great! For us then, rock was an equivalent of what boogie-woogie was for Skvorecky during the war… "Catch the tiger" [editor’s note: Petr is referring to “Tiger Rag”]. Yes, my musical tastes are indeed eclectic, as they are for all forms of art, and I don’t mind wrong notes. Now back to your question. Frankly, I don’t ruin myself by buying endlessly the latest versions of this or that Mahler symphony, even if apparently Simon Rattle did something very special. I have a few records, but we cannot speak at all about some kind of collection; I cannot afford that so I listen to the radio and wait for surprises. Here and there I have from a friend, a Polish contrabassist in a Flemish symphony orchestra, a free ticket. Most recently it was Buckner’s 4th and it was really great. Ella—of course; Billie—absolutely; Janacek—for sure! Each time I listen to the Sinfonietta, I get high with those three harmonics played by the whole violin section on the far side of the bridge, and those sublime dissonances in the 2nd movement and the fanfares in the final movement. Well. You have understood, I love well-ordered dissonances. AS: I’d like to refer to some of the material in Marcel van Jole’s essay about you. I imagine your parents during their time of refuge in London getting addicted to Chinese food, something previously unknown to them. Then they return to Czechoslovakia when the war ends and, due to their unsatisfiable cravings, are branded Bourgeois-Sinoists. PS: Here the brilliant mind of yours built up a theoretically possible construction...but in reality my parents, during the wartime in England and according my mother´s testimony, didn‘t have much of a choice and ate mainly mutton. Even worse, while pregnant, mother was so disgusted with that, that she passed it thru the placenta to the twins she carried under her heart.... and till now my sister Helene and I cannot even think of touching that horrible stuff! Also, you make a serious mistake supposing that Chinese food wasn‘t availible. In fact, there was a very fashionable Chinese restaurant in Prague, where I went several times with Daddy—a dandy he was, he was, showing off, teaching everybody around how to use chopsticks. My favorite meal was Kung-pao chicken...All that sudenly and obviously ended with the Khruschev - Mao rupture. Nowdays, there is plenty of Chinese food, presented in fact by Vietnamese, a considerable minority, which moved in during the Communist regime as, at first, a part of an "exchange students"program, at that time without any regulation. Czechs, just as racist as everybody else, feel themselves to be superior as they did once toward Jews and cannot stand their sense of business and their "solidarity". To tell you the truth, they (the Czechs) cannot understand how somebody is able to work all the time and eat just rice! AS: So much for my fantasy. Let’s turn to friends. We were introduced by our mutual friend Allan Elgart, an extravagant and colorful character, to say the least. How did you meet Allan? PS: Thanks to Allan Elgart, I visited New York 3 times, met you and Hiroko, but also Miss Ship and Barbara Tamarin, who allowed me to show my drawings for a couple of days in her gallery on the 15th floor, somewhere on 5th Avenue. The story of Miss Ship is an incredible one and involves both Allan and me over the span of more than 40 years! She was then (I hope she and Barbara are still with us today...!) a caretaker of Paul Simon’s mansion (the one and only Paul Simon of course!). Allan got to know her in the '60’s. when he studied film direction in Prague and rented a room in her apartment. What is also funny is that, besides being often with Milos Forman, Ivan Passer and so on, Allan was in a class with Leslie Beck, a friend of mine from early youth, a first and only great love of my older sister Sasa, as she admitted very recently. He was very handsome and had the ability to learn English, French and German intensively, which seemed incredible to all of us. In '68, when the Russians came to Czechoslovakia, Leslie bought there, very cheaply, all kinds of diamond jewelry... and vanished! Last time I saw him was in London, winter '69, for a supper in his—for an émigré—luxurious place. We watched Elvis's "in the boxing ring" comeback show and Leslie get mad, because money-and-sweat-smelling Elvis sang "In the Ghetto", which offended Leslie greatly. I haven’t seen him since. Well, when I came to New York, Allan introduced me proudly to Miss Bozena (a very, very old Czech name, in history it was a name of a duchess, who reigned in Bohemia in 11th Century) Ship. To my surprise, she told me that she used to know my whole family. She often encountered my mother and had a friendly chat with her while my mother was having a promenade in the park with her baby-twins—that means me and my sister Helena. She also seemed to have known my father very well, his uses and habits. She remembered several times how "handsome, well groomed and gentle" he was. Okay, knowing that my sweet daddy couldn’t see a skirt without forgetting what he might find underneath... And with Miss Ship behaving so kindly with me, and her speech kept to such an ambiguous tenderness, that I was not long to understand that her scalp also used to hang on my adventurous father’s belt! Thirty years later, here we were, in New York, and she "just loved me" and my work. She took the portfolio with my drawings to Simon, telling me that he recently bought a "horrid" thing for $250,000, from a Haitian painter—well, it couldn’t be anybody other than Jean-Michel Basquiat himself!!!--and that she is going to do her best to sell to Simon and his fresh bride, Princess Leila-Carrie Fisher, something better.... And she did! Some days later she called me and sent me to Simon’s beautiful offices on Broadway, where his secretary offered a coffee, kind talk and wrote me a nice check for two drawings!!! And when Simon dropped in I could even shake Pauĺ´s hand for a second and hear his thanks! Now back to Allan. Around 1975 he used his strange capacity of being interested in all kind of things and got a diploma from the Gemological Institute of America. This gave him the ability to examine diamonds and sign certificates. My friend Zwi Brauner had opened a lab in Antwerp was looking for someone with both abilities and found Allan—how, I cannot tell you, you must ask him. Once in Antwerp, Zwi, an untamed talker himself, found out all about Allan’s background, including his Prague film episode, Leslie Beck, the Prague spring, and all the rest. At the same time, I was opening an exhibition in Antwerp. You had to see me then—I could, if necessary, dance the tango dressed in a velvet suit, black-haired, clean-shaven; my mouth gleaming with a full set of teeth, while conversing on any possible subject in my fanciest French, surrounded by diamondteers’ wives with the glass of champagne in the nicely designed hand... madness. In the middle of the mondaine vernissage, I suddenly heard behind my back an endless stream of the most dreadful and shocking Czech four- letter words... a complete collection. I nearly suffocated with all the champagne bubbles, became red, and turned myself to the source of that unqualified profanity. And there he was, smiling innocently, a cigar sticking out of his vicious face, dressed as a clown, hands in the pockets of his indescribable pants, barefoot in tennis shoes—an incredible, and, in that place and that moment, most unexpected sight! The rest is history, and we became very good friends! AS: With all this email back and forth, I’m wondering whether you’re able to devote the time you need to readying your work for the Houston show. PS: Last week was kind of strange. I couldn’t concentrate on anything so I started to pretend that I’ll clean the studio on the floor and ground level underneath. Of course it degenerated into something obsessive-compulsive, and I threw away most of years of accumulated and collected stuff, old projects, drawings, material in discrepancy and so on, in a somewhat weird way—maybe under the influence of a syndrome I had caught by living for a full 6 months in the company of Mister Hughes. To push the thing even further, I have contracted with a painter to re-do the house and studio facades (the studio is a small house behind the garden), including windows, doors, cornices... crazy. Thank God, in the middle of it I was called by a number of clients who asked me to design some objects, whose heterogeneous qualities brought me to the real world: a logo for a lobby group of diamond manufactures to the European Community, projects for producing a line of children’s toys out of specific new materials, a rich boy’s Bar Mitzvah stationery.… So I could suddenly step aside from "cleaning" and start with something else. In fact, all the activities I had staged before had the purpose of avoiding painting another two small pictures of Howard H., which, at first, I intended to do and take with me in the airplane. AS: Maybe unconsciously you were afraid of running into him in the plane—a Constellation, of course. Les peintures de Petr Schlosser par le Prof.Dr.ph. Mojmir Horyna Institut d Histoire de l'Art, Faculté de Philosophie Université Charles, Prague Le pouvoir et le mystère de la peinture accompagnent l'homme depuis l'aube de l'histoire. La possibilité de rendre l'absent présent, donner la ressemblance au visible, réussir même à montrer l'invisible, tout cela prête au tableau et depuis toujours une force redoutée et fascinante, parfois vénérée comme une sorte de magie ou passionnément refusée et rejetée ailleurs. Mais c'est justement cette force dans toute l'histoire de l'art qui change une simple réalité en monde humain, dont les métaphores s'accomplissent par les métaphores du tableau. Les parcours de la peinture du siècle passé peuvent être compris comme les mouvements agités par le profond réflexe artistique de la problématique du tableau même. La problématique qui a d'un côté abouti jusqu'à la revendication d'une pleine autonomie et suffisance de la peinture ou procédés et techniques de la création d'une oeuvre et en renonçant à la présentation du réel a transformé un tableau en artefact dans les oeuvres de classiques de l'art abstrait pour ensuite adhérer de nouveau à l'engagement du tableau tout en redécouvrant sa complexité dans les lignes parallèles et complémentaires du pop-art et de la nouvelle figuration. C'est justement dans cette - à présent déjà classique - linéarité de la reconstitution du tableau que grandit l’œuvre de Petr. Ses plus anciens tableaux ont puisé dans la version expressive du réalisme moderne, dans lequel la couleur, la ligne et la tache acquièrent leurs propres importances, non seulement expressives mais aussi structurantes et par-là même déterminant la composition. L'étude concentrée du dessin et de techniques graphiques d'abord, suivie par l'intérêt captif pour les problèmes de l'illustration ont ouvert devant Petr des suites de questions et d'inspirations. L'accompagnement pictural ou la transcription graphique plus ou moins libre et l'interprétation du texte - poétique ou prosaïque - touchent nécessairement des problèmes tel que métaphore, le rythme du parlé et la poly sémantique. Le langage - en analogie au tableau, mais d'une matière différente - relie la parole, l'écrit et la lecture aux connexions sans nombre des événements, superpositionnant la réalité, la pluralité et en même temps la relativité à l'horizon des sens. Même, en prenant pour base l'expérience avec la langue, le monde de Petr se tisse avec les rencontres, les aventures anciennes et présentes, avec les regards concentrés vers un seul détail ou ouverts vers le lointain, le concept de surface et les pénétrations de l'espace vers la représentation affranchie de la ressemblance. L'ordre de leur création et de leur composition est lié au "littéraire" et au "textuel" de notre perception et de la pensée du monde mais point par la forme d'une quelconque passive illustrativité, et aussi par une substantielle dynamique de leurs constitutions, pluri-accentuation significative et ouverture métaphorique. Le thème grandit à partir de rencontre de motifs. Ces motifs éclairent toujours quelque-chose d'enseveli et d'oublié de notre expérience du monde et ils animent notre fantaisie et notre conscience précisément à cette incertaine frontière où s'interpénètrent la mémoire individuelle et culturelle. Et devient ainsi l'appel pour une perception humaniste solidaire du monde. Dans la dynamique secrète de sa structure picturale le témoignage de l’œuvre de Petr Schlosser va au-delà de notre simple présence mais aussi renvoie vers les anciens hauts faits de la représentation peinte et de sa continuelle cohérence Ainsi "Les paysages nocturnes" se compose avec les rencontres au firmament de signes graphiques de constellations célestes devenant la surface de Léthé sur laquelle la sombre embarcation de Chàron vogue vers les ailleurs qui s'apparentent à l'infini, mesuré par le temple-observatoire mégalithique - voici le temps où les fleurs ne s'ouvrant que la nuit rayonnent des mots. Le cycle de tableaux dénommés "L'inventaire" rend présent la complexe construction de notre expérience dans laquelle un proche détail souvent ouvre un filet paranalogique de tableaux et de sens. Notre monde n'est jamais dans le pouvoir d'un seul dessin ou dessein mais d'un tissage incessant se nouant et se dénouant. "Les quinze dessins évanescents" est la métaphore de la mémoire, de la conception et de la disparition de son contenu. La composition "Quattrocento" évoque aussi cette osmose de la déperdition et de l'incertaine apparition du lointain à travers des transparences et superpositions faisant un ensemble purement pictural. "L'hommage à sir Anthony Van Dyck" contemple le proche, l'intime même - voici le portrait du fils du peintre - dans sa confrontation avec l'ancien, Petr tente une minutieuse et juste saisie de la réalité à travers des traits d'un illustre tableau..."Le Maître et ce que nous savons encore de lui" est un salut à Rembrandt et à sa peinture, cet instrument de la recherche, ses mises "au format" et sa protection de "présents-semblables". Ce semblable fait appel à notre conscience et nous invite à la co-appartenance avec les êtres inconnus comme dans ces "Les Rembrandt disparus" - voici l'image du à jamais spolié : toute une classe de garçons d'une école juive captifs au seuil de leurs vies se superposant tel un habit au portrait du Rabbi peint par le Maître...et comme eux, perdu à jamais. La relation du tableau avec l'objet que Petr assemble dans certains de ses travaux est un attirant et saisissant mystère. Il ne s'agit point de choses du monde externe et alors externes au tableau, mais de leur autonomie comme les composants apocryphes indissociables du même tableau. Le peintre se lie aussi à la réalité de la couleur et par sa capacité de s'"accorder" avec la vraisemblance comme démontrent les tableaux "Watercolours" ou "L' atelier en hiver" où la couleur caractérise le carrousel des saisons. Ici aussi la composition se trame avec la tension entre la ressemblance et la signification, entre le tableau et les mots. S'il est dit, que l'oeuvre nous situe dans le monde°°, alors une pensée engageante de cette force est présente dans "Les neuf carrés de couleur"°°° où l'incommensurable des cieux au décor de nuages et parsemé de noms des Icare et de ceux qui l'ont suivit, est arpenté par le hauts regards de visages humaines. Les tableaux de Petr Schlosser sont créativement souverains et supérieurement sensibles, registres de la complexité du monde et cela aussi bien par ses apparences externes que par ses projections dans notre intériorité. La peinture traditionnelle lia la réalité à l'ordre d'un unique concept et ne sut plus prendre la mesure de la complexité contemporaine. L'objet se résigna de son devenir plastique et à présent il survit simplement et décorativement, laissant dans le lointain les moments forts de son interpellante action. Le retour vers le tableau et la recherche de ses nouvelles possibilités créatives, significatives, même symboliques, est l'audace d'entreprendre de nouveau l'aventure pour la ressemblance du monde. Et c'est là et depuis toujours que réside son sens le plus profond. ° - K.Thomas °°- H.G.Gadammer °°°- Aéroport Bruxelles National |
      |
De Beeldenstorm - Roosendaalsebaan 4
4744 SM Bosschenhoofd (Roosendaal) - Provincie Noordbrabant
Tel nr 0031 (0)165-340333 - email adres NVDBS@freeler.nl