Pavel Trnka: The Border of Shadow

An opening of the exhibition on Monday, February 4, 2019, from 6 pm.
The exhibition until March 2, 2019

curator: Lenka Sýkorová
photo: Karolína Bílková

Accompanying program on Saturday, 2 March 2019, 2:00 – 4:00 pm – animation workshop for children, 4:00 – 5:00 pm – commented viewing of the exhibition and the exhibition activity of Klamovka Pavilion.

“It is impossible for a sheet of paper to die. Whey you burn a sheet of paper, it turns into smoke, vapor, ash and heat, it continues in other forms. To say when something has decomposed that it is the end of it, is a wrong perception, a perception of perfect extinction.” This is how Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh interestingly described transience. (In: Fear, Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, p. 57). From the English original published by HarpeOne, New York, 2012.

Pavel Trnka considers drawing to be a specific visual art medium. What fascinates him is the creative process with charcoal, which is in fact a primitive material connecting us to the first cave drawings. Even nowadays, charcoal allows artists to express their innermost emotions and situations around us through many different shades. Drawing, especially its monumental scale, is the starting position of Trnka’s artwork. He combines an intentional deformation of reality with the energy provided by actual drawing. At the same time, he draws inspiration from Chinese and Japanese ink wash painting. Trnka combines mere lightly drawn points or lines with a strong expression. Together with the dynamics of the idea that stems from observing human relationships and societal evolution, he is able to achieve the resemblance of monochrome drawings radiating a pulsating and static energy. His artwork has a certain meditative aspect that is also present in the new drawing installation presented in the Altán Klamovka Gallery.

The exhibition “The Border of Shadow” includes two monumental and three small drawings where Pavel Trnka develops the theme of an imaginative landscape with industrial architecture looming like a ghost. The indicated situation takes us to some interim period of an apocalypse of a devasted urban landscape that nature is reclaiming. The technical nature of architecture indicated in the central drawing “In the Mountains” is elaborated in details in small drawings that provide a better view of the devastation. The combination of charcoal, ink wash painting and rust makes it possible to play with different color accents while referring to the process of decomposition and extinction. Transience is the key theme of Pavel Trnka’s current cycle and shows his longtime interest in experiments, improvisation and meditation. Pavel Trnka thus opens up the question of the non-existence of perfect extinction.

Artist Pavel Trnka works in Prague and Pilsen where he graduated from the Institute of Art and Design at the University of West Bohemia (now the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art of the University of West Bohemia). This is where he has worked as an assistant professor of drawing and painting since the year 2008. In 2012 he started publishing Caves, a magazine of comics, illustration and drawing, to promote the high-quality artwork of Czech artists.

Lenka Sýkorová