Ondřej Petrlík is a deeply faithful painter with a distinctive creative temperament and recognizable style. In art, he is primarily interested in the value of the immediate trace, the sensual and emotional touch, the image (object) and its dimension of immediacy. He creates cycles of paintings in both classic and atypical formats, drawings, photographs, objects, assemblages, and installations. He prepares for the act of creation itself for a long time, carefully considering all the craft and intellectual components. Ondřej can be completely devoted to life-giving chance in the process, but in retrospect he tries to understand what art actually means to him with rational detachment and to express this experience aloud. His definition of the relationship between a work of art, its author, and its viewer is expanded by his crucial experience in the world of antiques, where Ondřej exists as an informed connoisseur, serious dealer, and passionate collector all at once. For Gallery 35m2, Ondřej has prepared an installation in which the artist's drawings and their photographic reproductions enter into dialogue. The dialogue is conducted through a common monotheme. Adjusted oil paintings and their color enlargements are dominated by expansive and confined areas. They provoke with their psychographic intensity and controlled randomness. Through their energetic and subtle hatching, bright white or whitish magical shapes shine through, a kind of vague but charming form that apparently has a completely prosaic prototype. In any case, these decomposed shapes timidly seduce us into an abstract perception of the images. Attention is diverted from the depicted to the color itself – as a means of absolute freedom. The colors flow willingly and harmoniously through the original drawing and its reproduction. The transparency, brightness, soft sparkle of pastel shades and their "invisible" reproduced values, empty white spaces and the signal red of clips, bent parts of suspended photographic paper – all this together expresses a kind of sublime unity of perception. In this current exhibition, I recognize Ondřej as a messenger of the freest artistic spirits. He is not a universal artist, however, and does not dabble in everything. The collection of drawings and photographs he presents here does not differ significantly in content from his previous work; on the contrary, it represents an extension of it. The nature of the exhibition can also be considered rather classic in terms of current practice. Ondřej Petrlík's freedom stems from a kind of swirling instability and the swaying balance of all the available painting and artistic forms he uses. A perceptive viewer will understand that Ondřej sees abstraction as too hostile, geometry as too seductive, figural representation as too sentimental, and expression as a rather relative concept. Ondřej swings joyfully, alternately in the guise of a simpleton and an aristocrat, somewhere between wild primitivism and puritanical refinement. He can distort reality with the instinct of a poet, but not beyond recognition. As he once told me himself: "...he is concerned with the deepest experience of reality, which has separated itself from him."
Michal Pěchouček
