texts about zs

Some Notes on the Present-day Work of Painter Zdeněk Sýkora

Lines, like programme structures, have no centre. They intertwine, cross, cover or touch each other, disappear to reappear quite unexpectedly – sometimes in a fraction of a second. They run in the time determined for them by our ideas, they run continuously without limit.

What is typical – the canvases do not bear names, they are curtly numbered according to the sequence of their origin. The painter is incessantly perfecting the programme of his new system. He changes the number of starting-points, the directions to be chosen, he makes changes in the width of the lines, in their number and colour.

The changeability of the choices and alternatives comes from the open system. This, moreover, says the artist, offers analogies and communication with numerous branches of science – from biology, medicine, linguistics right up to physics and astro-physics. This accessibility is made possible by the actual principle of this system which can be compared to the order by which the universe is controlled. As pointed out by contemporary scientific research, this order does not have a centre either, it expands equally in all directions, satiated through the processes of creation and extinction, variations in growth and multiplying, coincidences and given facts.

We can therefore maintain that Sýkora´s magnificent discovery, which had and has basic significance for his work and has nothing comparable in the contemporary artistic forms of expression, is outstriding our human dimension and is unveiling something that points to the future.

We are as yet not capable of fighting free form the grip dictated by day-to-day life. We seek escape routes through creativity and imagination – these being the bastion of our humanity. However, S7kora with his lines achieved something unusual, something with which he actually astounded himself, something that still enthralls him during the realization of his line processes. And no wonder, because the work he comes up with points to the very heart of the existence system of our world.

These are not pictures of anything, neither were they structures; no, they are the actual organisms, organisms of lines living their own life, endowed with a code analogical to the laws of world dynamics.

Studio, 1987

Some Notes on the Present-day Work of Painter Zdeněk Sýkora

Quotation from the text „Some Notes on the Present-day Work of Painter Zdeněk Sýkora“
In a typed collection dedicated to the memory of Václav Navrátil, Prague 1987
Author: Mahulena Nešlehová, 1987
Topic: work