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Good vibrations

A contemporary take on Color Field painting
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
April 16th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
It looks a lot better in color: Vladimír Kokolia's 2005 work Sunset.
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Color Fields


at Galerie Califia Ends May 18. U zámku v Horažďovicích, Horažďovice, south Bohemia. Open Thurs.-Fri. 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.-1 p.m.
An excursion to Galerie Califia in Horažďovice, south Bohemia, offers a different kind of landscape: works inspired by the original Color Field painters of the 1950s and ’60s. Six artists from the Czech Republic and five from the United States are featured in the exhibition, with an even mix of established and young talent.
“Color Field” is a term that was first used in the 1950s to describe Abstract Expressionist painters whose works were dominated by large areas of solid color, such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. In the mid-’60s, a second group of artists emerged whose works expanded the definition of Color Field, such as Frank Stella, Brice Marden and Helen Frankenthaler.
While this exhibition showcases paintings, it also includes sculptures and installations.
At the entrance to the exhibit, Kateřina Štenclová (born in 1959), who is the exhibition’s only true Color Field descendent — and, in that respect, a rarity on the Czech scene — has four monochrome paintings in waves of red tones. In a catalog of her works from 1994, Štenclová writes, “I’m concerned with the weight of the emanation of light, its warmth, vibrations, brightness and lighting capacity. The quality of the emanated color assigns the way I deal with the particular material.”
Štenclová’s works in this show are hard to miss or ignore as a collective unit. Moreover, they serve as a guiding light for the other artists on display.
Vladimír Kokolia, the most widely known Czech artist in the show, has shown his works in numerous Czech and international exhibitions since the 1980s. Kokolia, who is not typically identified with Color Field painting, tends to strip his imagery down to the bone. His painting Sunset (2005), which fully dominates a single wall of the main gallery space, is a bombed-out Gothic cathedral of shadows and light, a labyrinth of vortexes in black and colored shadows.
Monika Drábková holds down the other side of the main room with canvases that are a more rustic take on Štenclová’s monochromatic fields. Drábková’s colors combine as if they were enlarged amoeba cultures, or multihued pockets of farmland. The paintings are heavy in tones of red, green, black and brown, like the colors of fields and forests.
Whereas Štenclová is almost reinventing color in her contrasting and overlapping of hues, Drábková more easily relents to vibrations of nature.
The show includes a couple of nature-inspired sculptural installations that are well-suited to their outdoor setting. Appropriately placed in the garden courtyard of the gallery are Alena Krauseová’s huge ceramic pods with natural tree branches extending out like contorted limbs. Krauseová (born in 1978) is also exhibiting some curious little men in swimming trunks, hung from the ceiling in the main hallway so that they swim just above the heads of visitors.
Another man-nature dichotomy is a huge papier-maché onion lantern, glowing gold in a dimly lit room. Its creator, Jane Heaton, was inspired to make Cibulova Lucerna by Czech farmers, seamstresses and traditional Czech lantern processions. She constructed it last fall in the fields near Galerie Califia while studying with the American artist Barbara Benish, the founder and director of the gallery.
Benish’s former professor, Roland Reiss, is also in the show. He is a well-established painter and sculptor who studied at the storied Black Mountain College in North Carolina, then went on to chair the MFA program at Claremont Colleges in California, where Benish completed her graduate work. Reiss has six small, thin glass paintings in the main exhibition space, made with fine, light colors. They are ultralight counterparts to the heavier works of Kokolia and Drábková.
The heaviest piece in the show, both in weight and color density, is by American artist Jon McCafferty. His untitled sculpture from 1998 is a large block of wood with layers of brown paint, glossed over with transparent varnish to give an effect of full depth and saturation. There are also thin horizontal stripes of other colors on the sides of the wood block, which look like colored layers of bark.
Bill Radawec, based in New York City, parodies Minimalist and Conceptual artists working in monochrome with his canvases that resemble color chips from a paint store. The paintings are composed of flat blocks of contrasting colors, such as a square of pink over blue, or a square of gray over beige. He gives each hue ironic names like “Fidelity” or “Rhythm.”
However, only the young Czech artist Jitka Petrášová strived for real rhythm in her work. At the opening for the show, Petrášová played recorded jazz in the room devoted to her paintings, a series titled “Nadraží” (Train Station). The works are essentially jazz paintings with no identifiable imagery, dominated by dark and light blues with heavy lines in red. Her paintings get to the roots of jazz.
With her contribution, Petrášová makes a proper nod to “bohemians” of another sort, reinforcing the core mission of Galerie Califia: to bring together Bohemians of all stripes for cross-cultural dialogue and all that jazz.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


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