Pavel Brázda

Railway station alley 1943-1954

One of the premises of hominism was its mistrust to modern art. That mistrust included formalism in virtually all strands of its avant-gardes as well as highly exclusive revolutions, i.e. the imitative follow-up to elements from fauvism, expressionism, cubism and all their filiations, as well as surrealism.

HOMINISM IS ART ABOUT AND FOR PEOPLE

Above all about people, and hence for them, too. Rather than being restricted by any theoretical programme, it opens itself to human togetherness. Brno hominism was an extrovert or quasi-extrovert subdued expressionism. It focused primarily on people’s lives in the city at the time, and additionally on the entire then exotic world, from skyscrapers to jungles. It depicted the riches and misery of our technical civilization, trusting in its free future and its celebrations. Railway Station Alley (1953), based exactly on a lost template drawn eleven years earlier in 1942, is the only work in colour painted in a way that it can be a representative gallery example of Brno hominism.

The monster's waiting, the monster's bidind time (self-portrait of PB) 1949-1950

was the first painting that the 23-year-old author considered for a gallery. He cherished the hope that in a very distant, vague future it would be exhibited in Prague. Even in 1949, Brázda didn’t believe that the Communist dictatorship could change in a foreseeable future, and that Czechoslovakia could free itself from the Soviet system, or that the Soviet empire could fall other than by war. He wasn’t sure he’d live to see that change. That is also why he named the painting The Monster’s Waiting, the Monster’s Biding Time.

He started working on it not long after his expulsion from the Academy and finished it when he was officially registered as a painter apprentice. He imagined that perhaps one day, if everything is not destroyed by war, the painting would be exhibited on the first floor of Václav Špála Gallery, which was more attractive then than it is now.

Experts on fine art didn’t seem to take any notice of him. What they could appreciate about his work – more than once – was its alleged likeness to certain Hausner’s works from the Vienna school of fantastic art. Except that Brázda’s “Monster” was painted about 10 years earlier, so it could hardly be incorporated in the proclaimed internationality of Czechoslovak fine arts. To be commended as such, it lacked a foreign model supported by art history.

Forgotten to shave, haven't you? 1950

Mirrors depicted in this painting used to stand in private barbers’ shops and their display windows. Above them were usually signs with inscriptions like the above title or GOOD SHAVE, GOOD MOOD and OUR SMILE, YOUR SUCCESS. The painting means to be a mirror that reveals not only its protagonist but also bits of life that surrounds him.

In Forgotten to shave, haven’t you? the verism of a closely observed face, fingers and lather on the shaving brush and in the bathtub meets the motives from ordinarily illustrated and naively erotic magazines provided to P. B., a wall painter apprentice at the time, by his good master Zdeněk Výborný.

Whereas in American pop-art, highly detailed heads (Chuck Close) were based on photographs adapted into painting with no significant changes, Brázda’s almost hyper-realistically detailed depiction of the face with exaggerated skin structure draws on European painting tradition from the van Eycks and Dutch schools to Mantegna. Above all, Brázda was inspired by his favourite armiger’s head in Mantegna’s Crucifixion in Louvre, whose black-and-white reproduction in Élie Faure’s History of Art was his strongest incentive to further accentuate carnation to an extremely emphasized form with microscopic details.

5 minutes before the end of the world 1945 - 53

5 minutes before the end of the world 1945 - 66

While V. Nováková worked on her second monumental composition Sic transit gloria mundi, this time with a simple ideological and compositional design, P. B. started to exploit and elaborate the sum of experience of a person who found his own life not so much in the outer world in which he never acclimatized, but rather – with mixed feelings – in the world of his imagination and its records, both literary and drawn.

Some of these had to be re-formed and arranged to a complex but open whole, to give them a more expressive sense, make them more accessible and bring them nearer to perception. Distancing himself from the lived experiences allowed the artist to create an extremely complex drawing out of the original material, which sometimes seemed almost repulsive like disembowelled guts, and later, in 1965, an orderly, aesthetically pleasant painting that could feature in a cultured flat and may even make a distinctive decoration.

Do-gooders (Bed is the right place od worship) 1953

Do-gooders (Bed is the right place od worship) is a radical demonstration of a change that remains distant to modern art and aims to be something else that begins beyond, expressing the reality in a manner unachievable by virtually any strand of that past art.

The work draws not only on a Cranach-like subtle carnation style but also on a decorative representation of the drapery covering the bed under the couple like an altar, following the lead of medieval illuminations. In this manner it floats from the ornamental black and gold frame through the starry night towards an open window, in which a divine morning sun appears, looking down on the couple. All formal means – by no means an end to themselves – serve to exactly represent and reconstruct a real situation. In P.B. and V.N.’s bedroom there was indeed a relatively large window letting in the morning sun, in whose warmth and light P.B. enjoyed lovemaking.

PB's wife Věra with out-painted wings 1951

Brázda’s strict opposition to modern art and its sloppy, casual improvisations was associated with unflagging respect to the solid art of old masters, as well as traditional disciplines like portrait or nude painting. In that, he had rather perfect models in masters like Cranach or Fouquet and Clouet, sometimes also Ingres, although what Brázda mainly appreciated in his Turkish Bath was that the bodies resembled oysters.

To honour model masters of splendid painting as well as Věra Nováková, he painted a work which was later titled Věra with Out-painted Wings. Originally, she indeed had wings, as if grown into her body – which is hard to imagine today – and the image felt natural, like in many other renaissance, baroque and classicist creatures.

The walking boxes 1954

Walking Boxex presents a culmination of the loose story of Do-gooders. It is one of Brázda’s most notable paintings from 1950s, in which the stylized realism of the first half the decade reached a point balance between reality and super-reality, between factual concreteness and its abstraction, giving rise to a formally simple and classical work or art. The painting reminds of Gothic and early Renaissance styles. Not much, admittedly, but it has more in common with them than with modern art; except perhaps sharing some features with Chirico and some with Warhol. The Warhol-like elements are apparent at the first sight in the multiplied figures on the fence, but given the timing, the idea cannot have been Warhol’s influence; the painting was finished as early as 1944.

Astronauts 1954

The Silver astronaut, as far as it’s known, was the first factually depicted astronaut in a cosmic space suit to appear in 1954 on the Czech, or perhaps even international painting scene. In the painting the astronaut is somewhat stooped, as if under the weight of infinity, which anticipates a sort of metaphysical space. It all began with a photograph found by P.B. in a French magazine brought to Czechoslovakia. Hence the ASTRONAUTIK sign, erroneously derived from the French astronautique. The photograph was accompanied by the astonishing news that humanity was indeed going to fly to the Moon.

Large Astronaut 1954

The Large Astronaut is half human, half robot, or at least a human partly armoured in the middle of the universe, marked by black stars on golden background. And so there’s a figure standing firmly astride in the middle of the universe. The figure reaches his hands out, thus reaching with its power and the will to courageously venture in the space. He measures himself against its non-human infinite dimension and meaning, gives up on reaching it, accepts his human limits. He is both powerful and powerless. His raised hands can be interpreted in various ways. The Large Astronaut with its strange rendition of modern human being as a monumental statue of has remained a unique figure.

Guardian Angel 1954 - 61

The first version of the painting can be titled The Apprentice and the Humanist Angel. The apprentice remained unchanged in the final work. He is a lad who got to some monstrous factory (such as Moravská Ostrava as it was seen by P.B.) with heavy industry machinery operating with the motto: There’s a human being at the end of our effort, and the apprentice reacts with his own answer.

A representation of an entirely earthly scene was again elevated to an almost allegorical level and arranged into a generous planar composition from which only a low relief protrudes. The plastic elevation from the frame and the red background, ornamentally animated by the inferno of heavy industry, is achieved by the slightly protruded head of a utopic demon and other embossed attributes on its cool blue body.

Racers 1956–1958

Racers no longer express a person’s feelings five minutes before the end of the world. They express changes in political atmosphere. The lavish colours of Racers alone contrast with the grey of previous paintings and suggest that something from the surrounding world began to open at the time. Thus, races can be seen as a competition between social systems, ideologies etc., but also as a struggle between individuals. We can see a chance brought by the thawing of those years, but also the drive of death, or life that can avoid death. Each racer – in his individual lane – can indeed win, or crush. Either way, each undergoes a risk, whose limits are never exactly calculable. The spectators around buy tickets and watch the race. They can look on, cheer, keep their fingers crossed, but that’s all they can do – if for no other reason, then because they don’t have machines that would allow them to join the race. In Grand Prix, the audience are still living people from 1950s.

Over the dead foe 1956–1958

The young soldier standing above the dead enemy is probably a Russian soldier over a dead German. This rosy-cheeked boy soldier, still a rookie who looks almost like a child, basically did nothing wrong – just obeyed like a child.

If he hadn’t and hadn’t fired when commanded to do so, he would have been shot in the back by a political commissar without a second thought. Army is there to obey and kill. Even so, when the Boy soldier with his head tilted in astonishment stopped on the battlefield over the dead Enemy with stiff eyes that keep staring, his own eyes are stunned and a little red, as if they were burning or were to fill with tears. The big dead head, too, looks amazed by the fact that it’s dead and becomes an accusing form in the middle of a flowering meadow. And the Boy soldier, probably good and innocent, is beside himself wondering what it was that he did and what death is.

Father's portrait 1967

This portrait draws from the mutually tense and often conflicted relationship between the author and his model. It is an ironic celebration and humorous revenge for his past injustices and – as it subsequently turned out – future ones as well. The father is presented – and this is how he is generalised – as a self-centred and somewhat intimidating authority, a monumental centre of some three-part altarpiece. The result is a bizarre deity seen from a terrible proximity.

Tender-eyed tenderfoots tend to attend tender loins second version, 2005

The influence of personal circumstances generally appears with great delay in P.B.’s work. One extraordinary event was a great, spectacular tour of Italy that P.B. and V.N. went on in 1967 for 100 dollars that they had put together.

The amazing delight that P.B. experienced when he saw (beside many other works) Angelico’s paintings in San Marco church in Florence, together with the modest Skira monograph, the only publication featuring good-quality reproductions, made him want to use similarly tender, clear and bright colours. He did so when he coloured the first composition that offered itself. What is happening in the painting – in contrast to the imaginary order of the angelic Master and all other equally admired artist of the duecento, trecento and sometimes quattrocento – is too much like the arbitrary disorderliness of the earthly life to come near the unattainable perfection of their ethereal Beauty. In any case, they are different works of art.

City behind the walls Late 1970s

City behind the Walls is a splendid, perfect painting, classical and aesthetically pleasing. The subject is more disturbing, though. It is Brázda’s subrealism at its deepest obscurity.

This terrible, extremely psychological work, one of the scariest painted by the artist, its final conception being created by the notorious evil nymph Anna Lisa, represents an infernal, or infernal-seeming forbidden land behind normal world and beyond its control. Secret ritual scenes are enfolding in the painting, the parables of which reveal the true nature of bizarre relationships and their accompanying complexes.

Trial late 1970s

This painting is above all a monument to the communist totalitarian system, and by extension, to all similar police regimes from inquisition to present-day torture chambers. It depicts political monster processes of 1950s, primarily with Milada Horáková, Záviš Kalandra and others, and their permanent marks in the following years of the resulting regime.

The theme began to emerge unintentionally. First, P.B. was intrigued by a reproduction of a film poster of I, THE JURY, published in a regular Czech newspaper, which was a rare exotic document the like of which he collected. The poster presented a super-tough hero, apparently purely brutal, an American secret agent James Bond shooting a bare-breasted woman in the belly.

The captivating words I, THE JURY then resonated in the head of the future maker of this work. It reminded him of the judge from I, the Jury, who sent the opponents of a terrorist system to death and of the methods that were used to press the victims. Just hearing the broadcasted testimonies, in which these once free normal people accused themselves speaking in phrases inserted in them like into machines was an unforgettably dreadful experience. It was an open demonstration of the skills of Soviet people-breaking experts, who could transform humans into perfectly manipulated creatures, and the work of their local colleagues.

Frank the frank appearing larger-than-life 1970s

In early 1970s, PB met an old mason, Mr Stehlík, whom he helped with work on his family country home in Rumburk, and who was expert in stucco plastering. Brázda learnt to cast plaster from him. He began with a series of embossed faces. He made use of children’s plasticene; on a glass pad he moulded embossed heads or masks or faces, to be more exact. He based them on classical models, especially ancient ones from Mesopotamia, Egypt and ancient Greece.

Thus instructed, only exceptionally taking notice of the real model, Brázda stylized these faces into several inconspicuously different types in a deliberately moderate and classical manner; very differently from his oneiric faces from the same period.

PB especially concentrated on polychromy. He used aluminium and bronze, combined with various acrylic paints. To enliven the coloured areas, he sometimes sprayed them with a fixing tube. He put special emphasis on eyes, which usually were a different colour. They stand out even more distinctly like coloured enamel inlaid into ancient, originally golden-coloured bronzes or golden mediaeval statues.

PB admires ancient heads with mesmerizing eyes – with their alive or half-alive character they persuade the observer of their independent existence, and with their immortality they exceed its usual limits. They seem like messengers from the afterworld realm of dark desire for the unattainable. After all, eyes are visible extremities of the brain, a supposed abide of the soul. When PB’s eyed gaze into a metaphysically absurd world, their author doesn’t feel an absolute difference from the eyes of ancient statues staring into an absolute of another nature. He cherishes them as an ideal of perfection.

Colorful heads Acrylic on canvas, 1994-95

After working on black-and-white xerox drawings and collages for an extended period, Pavel Brázda began rendering them in colour in past years. Out his black-and-white work, which has no smaller ambition than to cover the entire world theatre in all its beautiful and horrible positions, he decided to first render in colour human faces and heads.

In one of his preserved fragments Heraclitus of Ephesus says very simply: “I searched for myself.” In another: “You wouldn’t find the soul’s boundaries, however far you walked.” We all search for ourselves, whether or not we realize that. We all grope in the dark for our true form.

None of us is spared of confronting thousands forms of the human soul on that journey. Pavel Brázda draws our attention to these forms; but when he looks at our and his own “grimacing” in the process of searching and finding the infinite forms of our souls, he does so from a distance that is both ironic and sympathetic.

from the colorful heads series digital print on canvas, 2007-2017