Jan Svoboda

Jan Svoboda was born in Czechoslovakia in 1957 and now lives and works in Radňovice in Moravia. He is a painter and sculptor who studied at the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Brno University of Technology but did not attend art school. Since 1983 he has organised more than 120 exhibitions devoted to abstract landscape paintings deploying geometric symbols and images. Up until the 1990s he worked in Brno as a building designer, and since 1991 he has worked at his farmhouse in Radňovice in the Vysočina region. This has earned him renown as the “painter from Radňovice”. As well as painting he also makes wooden sculptures and designer furniture.

Over recent years Svoboda has exhibited several times with the photographer Jindřich Štreit, who has long been recording the life of the ironworks in Vítkovice. Štreit discovered many interesting details in the machines, floors, walls, ceilings and the scrap iron of the old ironworks. He photographed these details and showed them Svoboda, who noticed how the photographer’s industrial still lifes resembled his own oil paintings, with their simple compositions, muted colours schemes and geometric symbols and graphic elements. The two created a connected series of works that might be described as “thinking in images”. The philosopher Miroslav Petříček, in a study of the same title, writes: “Someone stands in the landscape, looks around, but then suddenly stops looking because their gaze is fixed.” Both Štreit and Svoboda stare at the details and typical features of their subject matter  in this way and shift the value of its information to the level of pure imagery.

Fans of Svoboda’s paintings often draw links with the Czech painter Václav Boštík, though the conceptual approach of the two artists differs considerably. Whereas Boštík sought the principles lying behind the order, structure and mystery of the cosmos, Svoboda’s paintings are rooted in the specific environment where he lives and from which he abstracts the morphological core. His means of expression include a basic graphic element in which images and symbols are not granted any specific meaning. He favours the simplicity of intuitive expression, and his circles, lines, squares, points and curves are not overburdened with logos. With its monochrome background, often whitish, the muted colour scheme of which was once called by one of his children “Svoboda’s gunk”, there is often almost nothing to be seen in his work, at most simply a line, a smudge, a shadow, the hint of a circle or square or other geometrical element. Nevertheless, the titles of his paintings correspond to his experiences in nature: Stín listu / Shadow of a Leaf, Tři části hvězdy / Three Parts of a Star, Lesnatá krajina / Forest Landscape, Tmavá krajina / Dark Landscape, Ostroh / Promontory, etc. From the combination of purely visual form and title we perceive the depth of the upland region and see how landscape can be meditative. Svoboda essentially creates oil paintings. However, there are fleeting moments of a different mood with traces not only of brush and palette knife but charcoal, hand, sponge, clothe, etc., and so the surface of a paintings sometimes possesses an earthy, rough texture. Indeed, the artist himself acknowledges this layered effect by covering the surface with overlay or pasty strips of different thicknesses. This then permits the subtle abstract symbols of circles, ovals, crosses and squares, optically often covering the entire semantic field of the image, to express intuition in the search for something fundamental in the world.

At his last exhibition in Prague, Svoboda’s paintings were confronted with the work of the German group Abstrakt Real, which deals with the cyclical nature of natural processes in nature. This group’s work is also based on a conceptual shift of experiences in nature to the expression of a certain mode of seeing by means of images that unconsciously touch upon the archetypes of our perception. A search is plainly involved for new possibilities of articulating a visual language.