David Krňanský studied at the Jiří Kovanda performance studio at the Faculty of Art and Design of the University of Jan Evangelist Purkyně (FUD UJEP) in Ústí nad Labem, and at the painting studio led by Jiří Černický and Marek Meduna at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He has made a name for himself over the last four years as a multi-media artist creating drawings, installations, new media and installations in public space. However, he is primarily a painter who struggles with the fundamental issues and challenges of said discipline in his works. He avoids conceptualism and links up a modernist visuality with the abstract present.
In his studio at MeetFactory, David Krňanský is at present painting geometric images in which he deals with colour and compositions. On a monochrome background he struggles to encapsulate the expression of the painting without an initial idea of the eventual outcome. This he does not deem important, and there is no sense in looking for other content in his current output, since he is only interested in paintings devoid of concept or theme. He adds content to his canvases only when preparing an exhibition, when he reflects upon how the viewer will perceive the paintings and what the individual paintings mean when taken as a whole.
Large series have resulted from his gradual resolution of painterly problems, such as BLACKOUT, Utopia and NOT DEF.
Utopia was exhibited in 2017 at the Leto Gallery, Warsaw. It is a free composition on a monochrome background with a modernist structure. The title plays with the ambiguity of “utopia of modernism” and “we no longer concern ourselves with utopia”.
NOT DEF was presented in the same year at Gallery 101, Prague. It involves paintings based on the principles of abstraction. In fact, they have the empty rectangles painted on them that appear in a text file when a computer does not support a particular font. Krňanský here enriches the familiar theme of the empty rectangle with the impossibility of communication. The void takes on the attributes of silence.
Similarly, in 2011–13 Krňanský worked with the smiley symbol (e.g. at the exhibition Barevné léto / Colourful Summer at the Jelení Gallery in 2013). Against a monochrome or gestural background a symbol appeared, a grimace of emptied anonymous emotion that caricatured the painting itself. The struggle between abstraction and abstracted communicative shortcuts and the question of turning communication away from personal written messages into a visual recording is more pressing.
The world and its communication is changing rapidly, and we are unable to react in time. It doesn’t matter what handwriting we have or whether we even still know how to write by hand. We have emoticons, likes, photos, etc., words stop making sense and our communication is based on impressions and feelings about what it should look like. We click on “like” because we want to follow it, we don’t care whether we really like it or whether we’re scared of it. “I like that“ means “I’m interested”. If someone doesn’t want to waste time, they send us a smiley, and their interest is piqued, we see black rectangles.… notdef …
We share, multiply, empty.
In the project Sedmiruký kouzelník / Seven-Handed Magician created for the Futura Gallery in 2015, Krňanský interrogated what the collective memory looks like these days. He first addressed the internet and post-internet world in his curatorial blog, in which he was above all interested in sharing, reflecting and emptying content. What happens to information when it goes wild on social media?
Sedmiruký kouzelník was a visual transformation. Polystyrene shelves, the figure of a magician, carved faces, aluminium plates with anti-spray finish – nothing is real, everything is both a backdrop and a barrier, an incomprehensible and unreal world. Krňanský undertook a project with a similar theme for the Gallery SPZ in 2015 at the exhibition Showroom.
Krňanský’s works vary depending on the current development of communications, but his characteristic structures remain. For him, modernity remains an inspiring source of ideas, even though these days it is more a utopia.
2011–2017
Vysoká škola umělecko-průmyslová v Praze, ateliér malby Jiřího Černického a Marka Meduny 2010–2011 Fakulta umění a designu Univerzity Jana Evangelisty Purkyně v Ústí nad Labem, ateliér performance Jiřího Kovandy
Art + Antiques: Jiří Ptáček: David Krňanský. Prosinec 2015
http://www.artcasopis.cz/clanky/david-krnansky
http://artalk.cz/2017/11/13/black-hole-generation-krysi-dira/
http://artalk.cz/2016/12/07/bhg-manifest/