Last call at Václava Špály

For what will likely be the last show under its current management, Václav Špála Gallery is stepping away from the conceptual and political tendencies of the Czech art scene to present a group show that focuses on formal qualities over content.

The title "Hotline" was chosen as a reference to the permanent, fixed connection between two telephones, a one-to-one communication line in a network whose purpose is otherwise to maximize connections. It emphasizes the urgency and importance of the connection, which in this case isn't between superpowers but between the work of art, or by extension the artist, and the viewer, who for this exhibition is assumed to be a romantic seeking above all an aesthetic experience in a gallery setting.

This connection may also be understood as being between the artist and the work, reflected here in several labor-intensive pieces demanding close concentration on formal aspects. Near the entrance to the show, for example, is Petr Kvíčala's 17 Days of Red, a meditation of looping circles within circles that overlap and cover the entire canvas, all in the artist's trademark orange-red.

Nearby is Pink Shadow, a large painted object by Evžen Šimera built from two rectangular canvases and two plank-like canvases assembled in a big frame or window-like structure. Thin white stripes cover the canvases in imperfectly parallel rows - the artist dripped the paint from the top and let gravity do the rest - while a pink-striped side facing the wall creates pink shadows on the white gallery wall.

An interesting counterpart to Šimera's irregularly striped paintings is a work by Jan Nálevka in the back room on the ground floor, We Can Lose Everything But Not Time. It's the most conceptual piece in the show, though perhaps "process art" better describes Nálevka's approach. The artist lined six 500-sheet packages of blank white office paper with blue pen, devoting considerable time to creating a "handmade" version of ordinary lined writing paper. Its lack of text poses the question of whether the paper is filled now, or is simply lined paper empty of text.

Jiří Thýn's Positive/Negative from his "50% Gray" series looks back to the roots of photography with a series of paintings on glass plates, built up into a composition. He exhibits the color-painted plates on a shelf next to a black-and-white contact print of all the plates - a constructivist abstract. The work draws attention to the mechanics and processes of analog photography, which are disappearing from the knowledge base in the digital era.

Down in the cellar, Jan Šerých's take on formalism ties in with geometry and especially typography. He has stacked large, boxy gray letters against the wall, elements of language that have been emptied of meaning.

Upstairs is another canvas by Kvíčala, No. 6, once again in his trademark red with white but this time covered in a maze-like structure, with scores of individual square "mazes" making up the larger picture. When viewed at a slight distance, diamond shapes appear to the eye where there is a larger expanse of only vertical or only horizontal lines.

Two paintings by Jiří Matějů, So It Was the Other Day and End of Summer 1967, curiously dated 1960-2009 and 1960-2010, are reminiscent of enormous plaid handkerchiefs. They are meticulously painted in thin vertical and horizontal lines, with several thicker bands in End of Summer forming a crossroads in the middle of the canvas. At arm's length, the solid lines appear interrupted, like an elaborate message in Morse code of colorful dots and dashes. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear the lines aren't broken, but painted over in spots with lighter colors.

Petr Písařík's works in the show also keep attention focused squarely on the surface of the paintings, whether with the dots, blocks of glitter and strips of sandpaper in his three-part paintings downstairs or the textured, almost geographical paintings upstairs, one of which vaguely looks like a vase of flowers and the other like an icy lake viewed from an airplane.

Milan Houser is showing two different types of work in this show. In the street-level windows and also in the cellar space, he is exhibiting objects constructed from paint cans dripping with paint, which runs into swirled puddles of color and spatters the surroundings. In the three pieces in the cellar, the paint cans are stacked in freestanding sinks that are pooled with paint. Upstairs, he is showing a circular-shaped canvas titled Eye, which looks like a giant green iris with a thick coat of clear polyurethane or acrylic.

Without any strong narrative or conceptual element to the works in "Hotline," viewers have the luxury of a direct connection on an aesthetic and experiential level. Maybe Houser's giant eye is a reminder that what you see is what you get.

Hopefully, once this incarnation of the Václav Špála Gallery ends, another one will soon begin. The Semma advertising agency, which has been operating the gallery since 2007, lacks the funds to continue running it and has agreed on an early end to its 10-year rental agreement with the district of Prague 1, which owns the building. The district will begin accepting proposals this month for a new operator to take the torch and keep alive a tradition of more than half a century of art exhibits in this space.

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