Running before crawling

In Tomáš Císařovský's show "Yellow Spot" at the Old Town Hall space operated by the Prague City Gallery, the artist is showing a selection of about 80 watercolors that turn the adage "You've got to crawl before you can run" on its head.

In terms of painting, most artists typically progress from watercolor sketches or preparatory studies to paintings, in oils or acrylics, meant to be hung on a wall. Císařovský has a solid reputation as a painter known for keen observations of contemporary Czech society, mainly figural works executed in oils.

Over the past decade, however, Císařovský, 48, has been using watercolors to create hundreds of works in which he explores his favored theme of man in modern society through a more immediate and pared-down approach. Many of the watercolors in "Yellow Spot" feature single figures performing some action, usually ones atypical for fine art, such as crawling and running. Another significant group of works are landscape impressions.

The exhibition's title refers to the macula of the human eye, which is specialized at seeing objects with great visual acuity. In Czech, the second word of the title, skvrna, has the general meaning of "stain," and many of the watercolors in this show revel in the staining that is characteristic of this medium. In some works, Císařovský bleeds areas of thinly applied pigment into more defined areas, creating a deckled framework around a landscape, for example, or allowing the sky and ground to blend together.

At other times, Císařovský seems to be intentionally working at cross-purposes with the inherent attributes of the watercolor medium, creating sharply outlined figures with almost no tonal gradation on a barren unpainted background, sometimes so simplified they resemble a linocut or very sophisticated potato print. Elsewhere, the artist places his crisply outlined figures against a decorative, splotchy background that recalls an amoeba under a microscope.

In the figural works, Císařovský depicts the human body in myriad movements, not just crawling or running but also squatting, reclining or sitting on the floor with one leg tucked under the buttocks and the other knee raised in front. The figures are also usually performing some mundane action and seem completely unselfconscious, caught up in doing the kinds of things that people do when they don't think anyone is watching them.

A few groups of figural paintings in this show are less convincing, including paintings featuring one or more octopi or jellyfish in combination with a free-floating human figure, which is either naked or dressed in a business suit. Another series incorporates skeletons, either as separate from the main figure - for instance, a little Jiminy Cricket of a skeleton perched on the figure's shoulder whispering some counsel in his ear in Quiet Little Voice - or as part of the figure, such as in Little Death, in which a male figure has a little purple skeleton in place of a phallus.

A third series overlays a wolf-like dog on top of a human figure. Despite their obvious appeal to symbolic or psychological interpretation, the visual paring down to the point of sterility ultimately takes away the human qualities, flaws and all, that Císařovský usually portrays so well.

In the back room of the gallery's lower floor, several landscapes of the Bohemian countryside and also more exotic locales employ watercolors in their more typical function as an ideal medium for capturing fleeting impressions.

Only a fraction of Císařovský's several hundred watercolors are displayed in "Yellow Spot." Císařovský seems intent on thoroughly investigating the qualities and possibilities of this medium, which has long been overlooked and underappreciated in contemporary art - a pity, because watercolors can offer visual delights that no other medium can mimic.

In this regard, Tomáš Císařovský is practically a pioneer on the contemporary Czech art scene, reviving and bringing back into the public eye an immediate medium in a visual landscape - filled with video and conceptual art - where direct connection between the viewer and the artist's initial conception is often lost.

In retreating from the large-format oil paintings he has been exhibiting since he first emerged on the Czech art scene in the late 1980s to the more immediate discipline of watercolors, Císařovský demonstrates that it is possible to run before you crawl.

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