David Pešat

The painted works of David Pešat tie in with the modernist concept of the image and its changing composition and formal expression and the artist adopts his own response to this starting point and rethinks, destroys, and remoulds it. Keenly sensitive to the frame of experience that modern art has passed through, he lays out the ground work for a free artistic approach to visuality itself (outside manifestos and orthodox avant-garde proclamations). Pešat sees visuality as a kind of ‘raw ingredient’, a material that is meant to be transformed and processed (The Heap / Hromada, 2009; Run Amok / Hlava nehlava, 2014). That is why metamorphoses of varying direction figure as the main creative motif in his work (Birth / Zrození, 2012; Apocalypse / Apokalypsa, 2011). That is also why most of his paintings lie within the ambiguous territory in between figuration and abstract expression (Burning Forest / Hořící les, 2009). It would seem that in painting (and not only there), doubt has been for ever cast on the notion of an object as something static, which is why painting is no longer concerned with the static object, with depicting and giving presence to the static object, but seeks to affirm the object’s dynamic relationship and declare the position the artist adopts to it (Cauliflower / Květák, 2014; Head / Hlava, 2014). That position itself transforms the identity of the object and objectivity in art and essentially the entire visual frame and format (Knee Landscape / Krajina klínoha, 2012). Sometimes the ‘revelation’ of a scene is arranged into darkness (Crown / Koruna, 2013), elsewhere it is smeared over and retouched with white surfaces until it vanishes entirely (Nothing / Nic, 2008).

The theme or motif is thus ‘the field of relations’ in which the artist relives the ‘act of creation’ through painting. In this case the painter becomes a kind of demiurge, formulating new and different ways of looking at the objective world through the gradual processes by which it is created and disappears (and also looking at the word and its meaning in similar processes of creation and disappearance, e.g. Old Testament, New Testament / Starý Zákon, Nový Zákon, 2013). A theme is a form of raw material, from which an object or at least a connection to one must then be ‘shaped’ and modelled, like in sculpture (Smoke / Kouř, 2009). The freedom inherent in this dynamic approach lies on the one hand in the openness of expression and on the other in the fact that the figuration is left as it is in various stages of evolution and is thus not submitted to any rational-analytic judgement. In other words, it remains itself, in its existence it is not alienated from itself and overwritten by the language of discourse. The objects here come across as something like ‘organs of experience’ (Big Defect / Velký defekt, 2014; Ideology / Ideologie, 2012). Open, revealed and concealed. As parts of larger functional wholes, or isolated and extracted from their context. Pešat’s painting is built out of the artist’s own energy, for and through which he discovers algorithms of a distinctive visual morphology that actualises various complex human conditions – from apathy and melancholy, to euphoria, resistance and ecstasy. The paintings are a kind of anatomy of transformation and references to the constant internal metamorphoses of humans, which in parallel influence and shape their view of the world. A view that never remains constant. 

Korpaczewski, Igor: Malířská škola Jiřího Sopka (katalog), AJG – Wotnerův dům, České Budějovice, 2006 Rezler, Aleš: VI. Sympozium současného výtvarného umění Jenewein (katalog), GFJ Kutná Hora, 2006 Vaňous, Petr: Neklidný tanec Pešatovy exprese, Revue art 1/ 2009 Vaňous, Petr, Možnosti exprese v mladé české malbě. Pražská scéna: Maleček/ Pešat/ Véla, Revolver revue 75/ 2009, s. 39 – 54 Čiháková-Noshiro, Vlasta (Ed.): Cena kritiky za mladou malbu 2009 (katalog), Galerie Kritiků, Praha, 2009 Vaňous, Petr: Dvě hodiny patnáct/ Zweistundenfünfzehn. Junge Kunst aus Dresden und Prag (výstavní katalog), Topičův salon, Praha, 2010 Vaňous, Petr, Fundamenty & Sedimenty. Vzpoura hraček 2011 (katalog výstavy), GHMP, Praha, 2011 Vaňous, Petr: EX (katalog výstavy), Topičův salon, Praha, 2011 Drtilová, Zuzana: Výstava, u které exitus nehrozí, Mladá fronta Dnes, 17. 12. 2011, s. 12 Wohlmuth, Radek (ed.): AMoYA: Artbanka Museum of Young Art Prague 2011, Art Deposit, Praha 2012 Vaňous, Petr: EX. Není lhostejné, kde právě jsme (katalog výstavy), Galerie Caesar. Olomouc, 2013