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I create pictures using a method that I call “material directivity”. A realistic narrative painting is created using the materials that I am painting. So, for example, if I was painting a table in an interior, I would paint the wall of the room with plaster, and the table with wood putty.

My starting point for experimenting with this method was when I realized that classical realistic painting is a lie in some way. Concrete, for instance, is portrayed using oil dyed with bone pigments! Meanwhile, concrete cannot tolerate oiliness and it has nothing in common with bones. Refusing to lie in the painting meant an ambition to paint truthfully and to look for a painting style that would create true pictures. Of course, this is with the awareness that the search is utopian and predestined to the impossibility of finding a definitive goal.

By using this utopian approach, I am referring to the great project of modernism itself, whose essential idea seems to be the quest for truth. This is not merely a conceptual game, though, where the described and the describer tautologically circle each other. Then I would necessarily have to get to the point where a table would be depicted with a table, a room with a room… and then I would be creating installations instead of pictures.

But I create paintings, new entities, new beings. Throughout their creation they announce their autonomy in that the material can never be completely controlled. Materials are often intended for the construction industry and their use in painting is absurd. This brings with it the necessity that I be a researcher–alchemist and investigate how to create a picture so that it “sticks in one piece”. Coincidences occur, “glitches”. The material resists; the process of creating the painting is a battle and a dialogue with coincidence, with error. A craftsman that uses these materials adequately tries to eliminate their errors. I, on the other hand, as an artist, use them in the interest of the work. I sometimes lose the battle – the painting cracks, for instance, and doesn’t let itself be expressed. Then I proceed to tear off the canvas (I usually use jute stretched onto a board) and I begin a new piece.

I was discussing materials that are sometimes liquid, and at other times solid. It is relatively easy to paint with these. It is more difficult when it comes to, for example, painting the sky. Or a person. At this point I engage in so-called “libation of the material”. If libation means a sacrifice to the gods so that they will change fate, bend reality somehow, so that the work will succeed, my libation is a moderate remove from strict conceptual rules and a search for a material that will represent the original at least in its “visual flavor”, so that the work will succeed. So, for example, I paint water surfaces with epoxide.

The human body is a great challenge. I paint it with “person”, which is a material I invented by (perhaps naively) posing the question: what is the human body, actually? It is composed of fats, sugars, proteins… so I started painting the human body with a mixture of fats, sugars, and protein.

Přemysl Procházka (*1991) lives and works in Brno, where he is graduating this month with a MA from the Faculty of Fine Arts, from the painting studio of Vasil Artamonov at the Brno University of Technology. For the second year, hunt kastner is pleased to be presenting in our projekt_room the diploma work of one artist selected from among the MA students graduating this year from the art academies in the Czech Republic.

Přemysl Procházka has already had several solo exhibitions to date: Galerie A.M. 180; Prague (2015), Galerie 209, Brno (2015); Galerie Monomach, Brno (2016); and most recently “Pauza (Pause)” at Galerie 35m2, Prague (2018). He has also participated in group exhibitions, such as the Nultá generace Festival in Jihlava, and in Galerie OffFormat in Brno.