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Jan Kaláb’s tenth solo exhibition presents never-before-seen paintings. The artist uses pure geometry and numerous combinations of bright colour tones to create diverse image variations blurring the distinction between the areas of painting and design.
Kaláb’s minimalist artistic language has been affected by his “life” in the street, by his youth spent with spray paints in his hands when painterly shorthand was often a necessity, while expressiveness was the goal. His view of the city as a geometrical and mostly colourless unit is amplified by Kaláb’s feel for geometry as such; after all, he studied at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, originally under Eva Jiřičná. His experience with architecture helps him construct complicated objects that he literally installs all around the world. Naturally, it can also be easily identified in large murals as well as in his ever more perfect canvases that he obstinately subjects to scrutiny. Unlike his usage of colours, his language has been undergoing a certain minimization; regarding the clash of blocks and cubes which naturally required the inclusion of circles, he has retreated from the use of angular shapes, “indulging“ in his own words in the “… tension of the circle.” The exhibition in the Villa Pellé Gallery also focuses on the circle and if circle really represented a subject of Kaláb’s artistic work, it could be called “A Tribute to the Circle” or “In the Tension of the Circle”. This is, however, not the case. His earlier canvases with cut out holes and more recent circular paintings, not limited to the traditional canvas format, as well as his hanging 3D spheres indicate that through numerous circular themes, Kaláb searches for a method of rendering a sphere on a plane while creating an illusion of three-dimensionality as perfectly as possible. For Kaláb, a circle is merely a two-dimensional depiction of a sphere, or of infinity, which nevertheless has its core, its centre. And its motion. A parallel to the Earth is obvious. His artistic scrutiny, however, focuses primarily on the boundary between what is inside and what is outside, or better yet, on the perceptual, visual riddle: whether I am inside or outside, that is, inside or on the surface. Thus the play with geometrical elements, which may at first sight seem more like a search for the perfect combination of colourful solid geometrical bodies, acquires an altogether different vitality – we witness a stubborn struggle for perfection. Pictures are no longer a “mere” long-forgotten flirtation with geometry and design, instead they form elements of one consistent path and obstinate search. It is not by accident that Kaláb’s motto is: keep going, keep inventing new forms. And although it originally referred to the essence, or “spirit” of graffiti, it just as well captures the artist’s entire work.