Lyrical landscapes

The painter and graphic artist Miloslav Moucha is among the Czech émigrés whose work remains better-known abroad than in his home country. Born in 1942 in the north Bohemian industrial town of Litvínov, he fled Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968 and settled in France, first in Paris and later in Lyon.

When Moucha was able to return to his homeland 20 years ago, he bought a country house in Zadní Chlum (which translates as "the back of the wooded hill"), in the border area between central and south Bohemia known as Onen svět, or the Hereafter. He still spends about half the year in France, where he is represented by Galerie Mathieu in Lyon. This gallery, one of a handful of foreign galleries that consistently participates in the annual Art Prague art fair, specializes in Czech artists; along with Moucha, it also represents Jindřich Zeithamml, Václav Boštík, Alena Kučerová and others.

Although his work is increasingly being shown in the Czech Republic, most of Moucha's larger exhibitions have been held outside Prague. The current show at Galerie u Betlémské kaple presents more than 30 of his paintings and pastels, and for Prague viewers unfamiliar with his work, it is a delight.

Meditative, contemplative and romantic, Moucha's approach to painting is neither typically Czech nor fully French, blending tendencies and characteristics of both.

Overall, the paintings in this exhibition are predominantly geometric and based in the landscape, whether that of France or Bohemia: Clouds, rocks and hills all are treated primarily as shapes in relationship to other shapes. Color is also a strong aspect of the paintings. Moucha experiments with mood and light by painting similar motifs in various color variations, as did Impressionists like Monet. Two similar paintings of a solitary tree, for example, are imbued with a wholly different sense of season and time of day, as well as different emotional timbres.

There is a strong sense of mystical symbolism embodied in both concrete and ephemeral elements. A number of the pieces on display are titled Bludičky (ignis fatuus), the phosphorescent light sometimes observed over swampy ground, better known as marsh gas. These works revel in mystical light set in a landscape, inviting viewers to follow along in appreciation of unusual phenomena in the natural world.

This contrasts with Moucha's treatment of more ordinary, earth-bound motifs such as logs, which he uses as dominant geometric elements that determine perspective and proportion in semi-abstract landscapes. He completely changes the view, for example, by placing logs in the middle of a landscape built up of horizontal bands of earth in the foreground, and treetops (or hills), clouds and sky in the rear.

Most of the geometry is soft-edged - clouds, boulders, hills - but another of Moucha's repeated motifs is a simplified, isolated house in a landscape. Peeking through the trees, its triangular roof rises like a majestic Alpine mountain. But it is also an intimate beacon, with an inviting, incandescent light glowing in the window, offering the warmth of home in a dark, lonely landscape. Or, awash with bright color and standing as the central element on a canvas, it becomes the painter's house.

Several of the works in the show are nearly monochromatic, painted in creamy light tones with the particulars out of clear vision, as if viewing the landscape through a thick fog. Elsewhere, Moucha lifts the veil and paints a dominant element in a starker and forthright style, such as Dolmen, a large, potato-like rock in mottled browns.

The artist's work moves back and forth like a pendulum between soft-edged geometric semi-abstraction and a more figurative style. What remains constant, however, whether the particular motifs are inspired by the French landscape or the Bohemian countryside, is a love of form and color and the resonances created by the inextricable relationships between them.

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