Innocence and experience

Although generally regarded in the fine-art world as clichéd or corny, angels have been stock-in-trade for artists for centuries. Since Modernism, they have mostly fallen into the realm of popular religious art or high kitsch. But Postmodernism brought a revival of angels to high culture, and, as recently as half a decade ago, they were making a comeback in the work of several young Czech painters, usually with a thick veneer of irony.

Kamil Vojnar, a Czech artist based in France, is dealing with the religious icon sans irony, using a combination of digital and manual techniques and a layered picture-within-a-picture structure to resuscitate a long-emptied motif. An exhibition of his photography-based works at Leica Gallery Prague is presenting this artist to the Czech public for the first time.

Vojnar, born in Moravia in 1962, currently splits his time between Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and Paris. He left Czechoslovakia in 1985, first arriving in Philadelphia (where he attended the Philadelphia Art Institute) then later moving to New York City, where he made his living producing art for books and CD covers, as well as providing images to stock photo agencies. He has held exhibitions in North America, France and elsewhere, but this is his first show in his homeland.

The artist states that he is mostly "flying blind" - also the title of this show - because, as a photographer and painter, he is basically self-taught, oblivious to "proper" techniques and processes. His soft, romantic pictures, printed in small editions on fine-art paper using an ink-jet printer, emulate the look of late-19th-century Pictorialist photographs. Most of the works have one or more square or rectangular insets that emphasize details of the image and often highlight sub-themes, such as illumination.

Brimming with innocent youth, flowers, meadows and figures in semi-conscious, dreamlike states, Vojnar's work embodies themes of innocence, purity, the fall from grace and redemption, all shored up by a strong sense of nostalgia. Inspiration is clearly drawn from art historical sources, such as his pictures of a girl floating in water with her head surrounded by flowers, or lying in a bathtub with her dress billowing up around her, which seem like restagings of John Millais' famous painting Ophelia.

Explicit Christian themes appear repeatedly in Vojnar's work - not only angels, but also Christ-like figures in Crucifixion poses. Although classic winged and begowned angels, embodied by preadolescent females, predominate in this show, there are also "fallen angels" - typically men in suits who appear to be at the precipice of despair.

A man stands at the edge of a Neoclassical building's roof, apparently ready to take a nosedive; another walks a tightrope suspended above the city; yet another is suspended on a tangle of wires between the dome and tower of a church in Morelia, Mexico. A man in a business suit with dragonfly wings walks by himself across a bridge. These and other figures are presented ambiguously: One of the first images in the show, for example, is a pair of suspended legs viewed through a window with New York buildings below. Is it a suicide by hanging, someone dangling their legs out a window or someone in ascent? Perhaps these suspended men aren't about to plummet to their deaths, but are ready to take flight.

Another recurring theme is the ritual purification of bathing - baptism and redemption. In some of the photos of the girl in the bathtub, her eyes are closed, and she seems asleep or even dead. A laundry line hung with white linens in the background represents an idyll of cleanliness and purity. In another photo, she lies in the tub with her dress floating up toward her thighs, slightly compromising that purity.

The girl is also photographed several times with a red Victorian sofa, lying on it or levitating above it. Some of the shots include a painting of Christ revealing the sacred heart. Despite such touches, after a while, the multiple variations on the same motifs and recurring props like the bathtub and sofa become tedious. The exhibition would benefit from a tighter selection.

Angels sometimes appear in more contemporary situations, such as sitting at an empty airport departure gate. Yet even this image ties into another recurring theme - breaking free of gravity and taking flight, whether via aviation, catapult, angel wings, levitation, suspension or a leap into the unknown.

Vojnar's work addresses the contradictions and ups and downs of life, embodied by pure and fallen angels. It's tempting to read into the images of men in business attire a castigation - and penance - of the "suits" responsible for the world's economic problems. But judging by the high proportion of angelic representations of youthful innocence, good triumphs in this artist's vision.

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