Art Review: Jan Merta: Liberec III at Topič Salon

As a boy of 4, Jan Merta scratched out Rembrandt's eyes - a moment revisited by Merta's painting Self-Portrait After Rembrandt, which reaches back to a childhood memory of browsing through a book of art reproductions and being so unnerved by the penetrating gaze of the Dutch master that he was compelled to scrape his stare into oblivion with a steel nail.

Merta's exhibition "Liberec III" at Topič Salon is a compendium, in paint and text, of such formative moments in the life of a budding artist. That perceptive boy has grown up to be one of the most respected contemporary artists, a painter's painter, whose abstract, semi-abstract and also occasionally figurative paintings get at the core of what it is to be human and to be an artist. "Liberec III" is the third in a series of exhibitions that delve into Merta's most fundamental memories and how they have shaped his artistic expression.

Although he was born (in 1952) in Šumperk, the north Bohemian city of Liberec is where Merta spent the greater part of his childhood, where his aesthetic awareness and sense of his place in the world were indelibly formed. The son of an evangelical clergyman, Merta lived with his family in a villa that was left vacant when its inhabitants, ethnic Germans, were expelled from the country after World War II.

After primary school in Liberec, Merta studied at the Václav Hollar Art School in Prague, but his family background prevented him from gaining admission to one of Prague's art academies. He worked at a series of unskilled and manual jobs, and finally in 1981 was accepted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Memories of the house in Liberec, of family life, school days and of becoming aware of the world from the perspective of a nascent artist are all dealt with in these works.

The centerpiece of the show, a monumental semi-abstract painting that depicts the time and place where Merta's boyhood conception of God coalesced, is titled A Lesson in Pantheism. It recalls the questioning of schoolmates about whether God's omnipresence extended to the gutter urinal of the boys' room or to inside a classmate's mouth, to which the artist answered "Yes." The painting is composed from the perspective of the urinating boys, while an enormous shadowy penis looms over the asphalt-cover wall of the toilets, presumably another signal of God's pervasive presence.

Alongside Merta's developing conceptions about theology and aesthetics, he was exposed to the carnal side of life. Regarding Gallery I-IV, four small canvases featuring female figures in autoerotic poses and one copulating couple, he writes, "I was regarded as a painter already at school. When I was 10, two worldly schoolmates of mine offered one day to take me to a gallery. … We came to a hole in a fence around an open-air cinema … [where] I saw a number of life-size figures. Somebody had drawn them meticulously in soft red brick, with some touches in white chalk. It was pure pornography. I suffered a shock. … I was equally shocked by the perfection of the execution. … It was as if I had seen a Giotto."

Merta has been making paintings reflecting on childhood memories since the 1980s. This is the third exhibition devoted to formative moments of his boyhood in Liberec, and there are plans for further exhibitions to follow. His strong body of work blends large paintings with small, intimate canvases, earth-shaking moments of comprehension with amusing anecdotes and visual snapshots. Whether thematically grand or not, the paintings as a group consistently demonstrate his excellent handling of paint, strong compositional sense and use of color.

The paintings journey back to the time when Merta began to view the world not only as a perceptive and sensitive boy but through the eyes of a budding artist. The best paintings in the show strongly evoke the light-bulb moments that, in retrospect, paved Merta's path to becoming a painter. What did he sense in Rembrandt's gaze that so deeply affected him as a young boy? Perhaps it was a feeling of being "seen" by the seemingly all-knowing eyes of the artist, yet which were also filled with compassion, something akin to his early conception of God.

Even in his most abstract paintings, Merta links back to direct human experience, such as in Oil Wainscoting III, which recalls the smell of paint being mixed by his father to complete a passage of illusory wainscoting in their Liberec home.

Merta's concentrated exploration of memory and visual archetypes is both a highly individual story of one boy in postwar Czechoslovakia who grows up to be an artist and a universal tale of the awakening of a sensitive young soul to the world around him.

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