Broth of crying
The sixty-four years (born 1950) old Václav Stratil is one of the legends of Czech visual arts. For the last three decades, he has been respected for his works that span drawing, painting and photography, and also for his lively dialogue with artists of several generations including his students at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. His current creative method can be well described by his own words as the “post-entropic principle”, a creative orientation in a system that reached a state of utmost disorderliness. This principle can be understood as the artist’s personal reaction to the post-modern break-up of the value system, as his deliberate intention to base his work on contradictions, and the necessity to have a committed attitude to symbolic reality. He openly professes to the legacy of Dada and Punk movements. However, by playful symbolic operations, he often verifies their poetic effects (including an occasional crossing the limits of social acceptability). In Stratil’s work, the emphasis on imagination and emotional experience is shown through tenderness as well as provocation, through hedonistic insatiability as well as ascetic discipline, through emphasising the everydayness and spiritual values, originality as well as imitativeness, introversion as well as eccentricity. When speaking about art, Stratil himself likes to use terms such as empathy, telepathy, detective story or sci-fi. Words of the gallerist Filip Polanský who described the exhibition titled Broth of Crying (Vývar z pláče) as a metaphysical comic can in this light be also considered a kind of telepathic bridge. He used the words of Stratil himself without having heard them before. Václav Stratil can be in fact regarded a distinctive institution of the Czech art scene. His surroundings often refer to him or oppose him in order to specify own boundaries. He is a person of many internal conflicts and indisputable poetic talent. In his various roles such as painter, cartoonist, photographer or musician, he stimulates the domestic art community by giving an example of work which is lived as situational performance. For this reason, the Stratil’s work is partially non-transferable – in the institutional as well as local manner. However, this very intangibility of his artistic practice is a component of Stratil’s role in forming the Czech cultural identity.
Jiří Ptáček
- It's important to say that Václav is00:00:20.745
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- responsible for this exhibition only partly.00:00:24.804
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- He made the paintings,00:00:27.585
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- deposited them in his school closet00:00:32.262
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- and there he let them get dry.00:00:36.158
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- When Filip Polanský asked me to prepare00:00:40.380
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- an exhibition for this gallery,00:00:44.129
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- the first exhibition in this space,00:00:48.322
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- he was interested in Václav's paintings.00:00:50.956
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- Because Václav makes various things00:00:56.851
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- and he doesn't paint at the moment,00:00:59.822
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- I had to go to the closet00:01:03.055
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- and try to select and put together pieces00:01:04.910
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- for the exhibition from a huge deal of works00:01:09.546
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- that weren't created in any sequence or00:01:11.498
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- with any intention of making self-contained series.00:01:13.997
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- During the selection, many exhibitions with00:01:17.322
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- unified theme or synoptic form crossed my mind.00:01:20.304
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- It seemed I could make five or six exhibitions00:01:31.029
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- that would demonstrate interesting features of Václav's work.00:01:33.604
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- Finally I decided to choose the least certain way.00:01:39.610
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- Differently from exhibitions we made with Václav,00:01:43.723
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- where unified idea or completed collection were important,00:01:48.904
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- this time I tried to choose from Vašek's plural thinking.00:01:55.913
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- When Václav paints or sometimes draws,00:02:00.265
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- he instantly changes expression, attitudes,00:02:05.571
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- theme, concern for the matter or even00:02:10.526
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- emotionally nervous expenditure into the painting.00:02:13.731
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- So I decided to make an exhibition showing paintings00:02:19.573
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- as if each of them came from elsewhere,00:02:25.325
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- but I wanted to do it in the belief00:02:30.788
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- it would be perceived as an expression of one individuality.00:02:33.917
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- That's the main theme of the exhibition,00:02:40.568
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- the paintings were made four or five years ago,00:02:44.643
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- I don't know which of them00:02:49.672
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- are older or more recent,00:02:51.532
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- because Václav doesn't date them in advance,00:02:52.884
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- but rather retrospectively.00:02:55.578
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- That's all I should say about the exhibition.00:02:58.421
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- I am writing at the moment.00:03:24.928
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- I'm writing a novel following up with00:03:27.916
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- my autobiography I published two years ago.00:03:33.577
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- But I am getting ready for painting again.00:03:45.310
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- I wanted to thank Jirka for this nice installation.00:03:48.926
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- When we were installing the exhibition and Filip00:04:19.456
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- walked for the first time around the paintings,00:04:21.412
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- even though he hadn't seen or worked with Václav Stratil before,00:04:23.493
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- he asked me if I was trying00:04:28.480
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- to make a metaphysical comic.00:04:31.958
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- And I feel it's exactly Vašek's words.00:04:35.951
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- That he said it and I stood there gaping.00:04:39.770
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- Then I realized Václav liked speaking about00:04:44.480
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- empathy, telepathy, detective stories00:04:47.299
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- and science fiction at his work.00:04:50.698
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- And these terms, empathy, telepathy,00:04:52.741
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- detective story and science fiction00:04:55.910
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- brought about this peculiar deja vu00:04:57.868
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- me and Filip Polanský appeared in.00:05:00.394