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Abstract urbanscapes

Špaňhel strikes black gold with gas-station nocturnes
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By Mimi Fronczak Rogers
For The Prague Post
April 25th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Špaňhel's latest works are all about atmosphere.
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The painter Jakub Špaňhel has been one of the major talents to emerge on the Czech contemporary art scene in the past decade. Since his debut solo show in Prague in 2003, when he was just 26 years old — a series of church interiors that was his graduation work at the Academy of Fine Arts — each of his subsequent exhibitions has further proven his considerable talent.
His latest show, consisting of just four paintings (seven were slated for exhibition but the gallery space couldn’t accommodate them all), features a small group of gas-station nocturnes that solidifies his stature as an extraordinarily gifted young painter. The show is part of Galerie České pojišťovny’s ongoing series “The Landscape and Figure in Contemporary Czech Art.” The titles of these paintings tip you off that the subjects are specific gas pumps — Aral, Benzina, etc., though they are barely recognizable in their highly abstracted states.
Špaňhel is no plein-air impressionist, dragging his easel out to weedy roadside ditches so that he might capture the setting sun over the Aral station. He paints in his studio, working mostly from photographs. With this method, one might expect some distancing of emotion, but somehow the opposite is true. The paintings have an immediacy and expressive energy that belie their once-removed source.
Jakub Špaňhel: Filling Stations

at Galerie České pojišťovny
Ends May 13. Spálená 14, Prague 1–New Town. Open daily 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Špaňhel is part of a wave of new Czech painters to come to the fore in recent years. Yet he differs sharply from most of the artists who were grouped together by Prague City Gallery curators in the big 2004 group exhibition “Perfect Tense,” which heralded the “return of painting” in the younger generation of Czech artists.
Irony? You won’t find that lurking in his paintings. Purposeful kitsch? A degree of gaudiness does appear in Špaňhel’s work in the form of his trademark glittery gold paint. Sometimes it works, but other times not so well. In the cityscapes he presented in his two-man show (with Jonáš Czesaný) at Veletržní palác in 2005, the sparkle sometimes went over the top. With the “Filling Station” series, he has toned it down somewhat, to brilliant effect.
The swathes and splashes of gold in Špaňhel’s “Filling Stations” are beacons to the weary traveler. The highlights of gold and white against variegated darkness create a gorgeous atmosphere, with the lighted signs promising respite along the journey, or an opportunity to top up your energy stores before they completely run out, or just to quench your thirst or use the loo.
Aral Station at Night looks to be from the perspective of the driver approaching the station from the exit ramp. To one side is a group of glowing golden streetlamps, below which one can make out the headlights and bumper of a car. Splashes of ghostly gray and white suggest the rays of headlights bouncing back off the asphalt. With its architectural structure of columns and lintels, it resembles a Greek temple as much as a filling station. There is a sense of late-night calm, save for the areas of gold paint.
Landscape in the Rain creates quite a different mood, with more agitated brushwork in blue, white and gold amid a range of dark tones and much more contrast of lights and darks. Two streetlamps directly opposite each other act as a sort of gateway to what appears to be a filling station, or perhaps an oncoming semi-truck. A distinct white X in a bright blue square hovers overhead, and a series of slashes, splashes and drips of paint simulate the refraction of light and the blurring of a driver’s vision behind a rain-spattered windshield.
Golden Filling Station is almost purely abstract, featuring bravado brushwork in white and gold against a black background, the brightness almost overtaking the dark in a scene of controlled chaos.
One smaller painting, Černý Most, portrays the outer Prague suburb known for its shopping malls and colonies of high-rise apartment blocks. It is the most minimal in color range, basically a series of vertical and horizontal elements in gold (trees or light poles, the overhang of a gas station, wisps of clouds) against a black background. There is a larger passage of gold brushwork, an amorphous shape that might be a tree flashing by in a driver’s peripheral vision.
Is the artist making some wry commentary on the changing face of the “Golden City,” a landscape in which motorists are overtaking romantic urban amblers, light poles are supplanting trees, and soaring signposts of gas stations outnumber church towers and spires?
It has been suggested that for Špaňhel, a motif, whether it’s a church interior or filling station, is merely a pretext for painting. Prague’s storied alchemists endeavored to turn lead into gold. With the fluid, emotive manner of painting in his series of gas stations, Špaňhel transforms gold into energy, leaded or unleaded.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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