Jan Wojnar

When during the early 1960s Jan Wojnar was deciding what path to follow in the visual artist, he deliberately opted for the least attractive, thankless and most difficult for viewers. He chose a path leading through a rational visual creative vision in which he explored the dialectical relationships and interdependence of individual natural, material and other realities. In 1967 he began working on monochrome white images-reliefs touching upon positions taken by the “new sensitivity” of that time. He explored the relationships between the monochrome surface and reliefs often by means of purely geometric forms applied to those surfaces.

An important area of his work is contained in the Přesýpací básně / Sandglass Poems composed in 1968, in which he examined the relationship between black, relief (ornamental) surface and its concealment with white powder (sugar or sand). These were typical open works in which the final outcome is decided by the viewer by virtue of the way they manipulate and change the works depending on their mood and the restrictions in operation.

The other major strand of his work at the end of the sixties is represented by Mřížkové básně / Grid Poems, the basis of which he formulated rationality in 1974. “... he realised that every relationship between two visual structures can be seen as the transformation of one of them by a certain grid. They first wanted (the Grid Poems) to make present in our thinking what relationship took place between two visual structures, but soon a range of mental processes opened up that could operate like a grid. ..... his experience naturally included extremely free realisations able to communicate in connection with verbal information.” (J. Valoch). All of his subsequent work unfolded within the framework of this definition and he constantly sought new positions for this theme. One of these was the photographic series that, when combined with his verbal and visual interpretations, comprised what were known as the Diagrams (e.g. Diagram of Approximation). These works form a significant chapter in the story of Czech conceptual photography.

Wojnar continued with this group using photographic film in the series Auto-photograms (beginning 1978), in which he examined the relationship of material to itself. By means of cutting, piercing and other interventions he induced changes that were documented with the aid of light by the changed medium itself.    

The Auto-photograms were followed by the Self-referential Poems in which the surface of the paper was the theme. Wojnar found traces of its folding or other interventions that could not have arisen in any way other than the artist’s interaction with the material without any extraneous elements.

The minimisation of the conceptual gesture and the precision of this research led Wojnar to a series of realisations in which the surface of the paper became the mediator, i.e. the witness of the understanding of an object or plant or the hand of another person. The artist’s own contact with the subject of interest left its own traces.

During the last years of his life Wojnar came full circle and created a remarkable series of white monochrome reliefs in which the attempt to achieve maximum precision of expression freed of all romanticising and narrative connotations reached its apogee.