Walls and mirrors

In his current show at Museum Kampa, Jiří Sozanský rips down the facades of the built environment to reveal uncomfortable truths about the totalitarian past in his homeland and hold up a mirror to its legacy in contemporary society.

In a statement at the beginning of the show, Sozanský writes that although the older and newer works were conceived in different political realities, "Now, as in the 1970s, there is a spiritual emptiness, apathy and decadence of Czech culture and society in general."

That feeling runs strong through his drawings, graphics and sculptures, where both the human figure and the physical environment are stripped bare. Human figures are often literally naked, while the buildings are decayed, scaffolding-like structures that vaguely recall the smoldering steel carcasses at ground zero after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Sozanský, who apprenticed and worked as a mason before attending the art academy, has deliberately not erected walls between figures, suggesting that the barriers are internal. Many of the interior walls are invisible, allowing humans to be observed but not to move about freely or escape.

The eroded buildings and confining interiors create a joyless atmosphere, like a destroyed city or a concentration camp. Rather than providing shelter and safety, buildings are inhospitable cages from which there is no escape - only the false hope of stairs, ladders and elevators that lead nowhere. The decayed buildings leave the figures exposed and vulnerable. You can almost feel the cold, dank air in an empty elevator shaft, or the bitter wind gusting through a gallows-like structure.

In Sozanský's works on paper, the bare-bones architectural spaces are executed in a precise drafting style. When closely examined, however, the angles don't all square. Walls meet at odd angles, subtly creating a sense of unreal space, like optical illusions of endless steps or impossible objects - two-dimensional constructs in which the normal laws of spatial geometry do not apply.

The naked figures in his "Basement" cycle, with their defeated posture, are inmates in an underground purgatory. They exist in isolation, or are seen encountering shadows of diminished souls, looking through them or past them, but not seeing them. They are doomed to remain in this depressing space with its single bare light bulb, trapped in an empty elevator shaft, cramped into a narrow space, standing at the foot of a hopeless escape hatch.

Sozanský also utilizes precise drafting to great effect in a moving series of portraits of his mother that chart her declining health and death. He draws her face in a realistic manner, using flesh colors, always with a deep frown. The remaining drawings are done only in pencil, apart from a few accents of color, such as hot and cold water taps on the bathroom sink, or a patch of blue sky out her window. He also outlines some arteries and veins on her neck and head, labeling them as in an anatomy book, and makes notes on the drawing about her illnesses and medications.

The series, made in the 1980s, shows Sozanský's mother solemnly going about her daily routine - taking pills, sewing, sitting at the window, looking at family photographs, seeing herself in the bathroom mirror as she goes for her medications. As her hand reaches for the pills, it is as if she were standing in the same spot as the viewer, staring back at herself simultaneously with the viewer.

Lying in bed near the end of her life, both she and the Spartan space she inhabits begin to fade away - planks in the parquet floor are erased, the light fixture disappears, and finally her skeletal figure seems to dissolve into the bedding as she reaches out to the wall. The last drawing in the series has the inscription: "31 October 1989, the cycle 'Days and Years of My Mother' ended." There are also notations of her birth date, the number of her identity card and a list of the modest earthly possessions she had with her at the time of her death, which her artist son signed for. She died only a few of weeks before the November 1989 revolution.

Compared with the crisp draftsmanship and purgatorial atmosphere of the works on paper, Sozanský's harsh, jagged sculptures of hulking buildings with their walls ripped away are more like descending into the circles of hell. Several of them originated in the Normalization era of the 1970s and '80s and were reconstructed in recent years.

Pieces with titles such as Landmark Situations are like huge elaborate gallows or colliery winding towers, with stairways leading nowhere, looming over human figures that never connect with each other. Even when there are no walls between the figures, they seem to be unaware of others in the same predicament.

One of the show's tours de force is a sculpture of a monument to commemorate the perverse show trial and execution of Milada Horáková. Titled Mater Mortis (mother of death), it is related to the artist's sculpture of the same name that was unveiled June 27, the 60th anniversary of the hanging of Horáková and three others.

The monument is topped by two back-to-back, gorilla-skulled but otherwise human figures. Surrounded on two sides by a scaffolding-like framework, the tableau also includes two headless dogs impaled on spikes, several burly figures with their arms folded in a guard-like stance, and four helpless human figures bound together with wire. It encapsulates the monstrosity of the former regime's deformation of justice and human relations.

In the Stalinist and Normalization eras, cultural politics demanded Socialist Realist art, which favored sugary, romanticized images of noble workers, smiling children and puffing factories. The work of Sozanský, who was disfavored by the communist regime, gives another meaning to Socialist Realism - that is, a reflection of the brutal realities that deform individuals and society. Political realities have changed, but Sozanský's need to see and communicate truths about the human condition clearly has not.

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