texts about zs

Cézanne´s heritage...

Cézanne´s heritage of dynamic modulations, Matisse´s sense of visual balance and Klee´s division and distribution of form elements brought forth the serially constructed compositions created by Zdeněk Sýkora.

In a certain sense his work is a psychogramme, a myth about self-creation and self-sacrifice, if we consider the degree to which the artist´s own, rather expressive nature was subjugated by his will to achieve precision in his expression of his personal and simultaneously cosmic feelings.

This creative myth will come alive before our eyes if we realize how great was the inner strength and discipline which made a potential expressionist entrust a certain technical part of his composing and constructing into the competence of a computer…

Here, moreover, we realize a very important stage of purposely bringing about the coincidental, through a basically speaking Dadaistic but very sophisticated method… Thus coincidence or chance, as an unknown but welcome order enters into the order of computers and starts operating a mechanism which finds a way of linking the world of the artist´s imagination with that tremendous perfection in the order of the macrocosmic forces. The result is an expressive form corresponding to the true, original nature of the artist, creating – together with that impersonal, super-human order – a never-failing, monumental polyphony of shapes, a sort of cosmic calligraphy.

Visually we can follow only a small section of the work, delimited through the format, because the painting, which is a composition without traditional scales, “continues” in space outside the frame as if in endless hypnagogic waves, like a symbolic “cosmic offering”; however, we are immediately recompensed by that which we perceive concretely and directly in the painting. That, the visible part, resounds like a visual “ode to joy”. The artist had already suffered the real sacrifice during the initiation of his work, in fact – is suffering still – but differently: during the process of creation through his ascetism in choosing simple and strictly geometric elements and rules for the coding of his basically robust, insatiably all-embracing expressive self-expression. He then manages to achieve a practically timeless link between the forces and powers of Great Mother Earth and the spiritual powers of Heaven – in close analogy to the yin and yang principles in Chinese painting. The resulting shape of this Titan-like embrace – particularly in paintings from Sýkora´s most recent period – truly thunders like a mighty fugue in defiance of all the contemporary surrounding entropic fears. Like a dynamic body open to ever possibility.

Cézanne´s heritage...

From the study Perception, Myth and Creative Art, KPÚ, Hradec Králové 1988
Author: Jiří David, 1988