We are used to reading lines of a drawing similarly to how we read physical features of a human face. From those several lines and points we manage to distinguish not only personality but also guess the state of mind it currently finds itself in. Drawn characters has become a common part of our visual environment. In them we will read testimonies about our traits and our acts that are, thanks to the character itself, freed from the weight of fatal determination.
Miroslav Barták(*1938) graduated from a naval academy and spent a large part of the sixties on business ships as an engineer. When he could draw in his spare time, he wasn’t so much interested in the motives of exotic lands or the peculiar physiognomy of their inhabitants. He didn’t aspire to prove his skills of capturing the outside world; he was rather interested in discovering what he could tell about it in the lines of his drawings. Quite soon he found the ideal actor for his meticulously directed scenes: a male figure, whose crucial feature was an absent mouth. In this nearly blank face we cannot read any emotions, which makes it all the easier to project our own ideas into it. Similarly we have the opportunity to confront our own experience with the stance Barták’s mute character has been adopting for more than forty years.
