Pavel Tichoň

Pavel Tichoň is an artist whose work is based on an intense experience of the present, an intuitive questing and momentary impulses. Subject matter appears to offer itself up to his treatment and his only task then is to grasp it and transform it into material form. Tichoň’s approach is characterised by lightness and instability in terms of media selected. In recent works he comments on the mechanisms of contemporary society with all its ailments, from consumerism and a blind confidence in advertising messages, to its morbid fixation on success. An uncertainty in the process of creation and a skipping from one thing to another is another trait of Tichoň’s work that prevents us from classifying him as painter or creator of multimedia installations. He is unconcerned by what is taking place on the art scene. He does not crave exhibitions. He does not seek to be included amongst the movers and shakers of the art world. He ignores entrenched structures by virtue of his independent existence, thus critiquing them and opening up a discussion on the role of the artist.

Tichoň studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague at the studio led by Milan Knížák and Michal Bielický. From Knížák he inherited a inclination towards postmodern aesthetics evident mainly in his paintings, and from Bielický a desire to work with video, sound and installation. As early as in the cycle of paintings Schielení / Schielenalia (2007) he had begun to work with the themes he continues to develop. As well as language games, he combines influences, references and direct quotations from art history and commercials. Expressive painting is a form of primary expression that allows him to pass spontaneously through emotions. Automated activities have the character of art therapy, but this is not enough for Tichoň, who needs to add other, non-subjective levels that better capture the message, which is too encrypted in his paintings and which even he is unable to state outright because of the often uncontrolled way a work comes into being. In this respect he is served well by a conceptual approach that lends an intellectual level to his paintings. Though it may appear that his work is full of irony and in places even a shallow, somewhat hysterical humour, always in the background there is something serious being communicated. However, he chooses the path that leads him most directly to the viewer, i.e. humour and hyperbole.  

Just as the unexpected links to his paintings are basically meaningless in a Dadaist kind of way, so too are the initiated scenes from the video series Pískoviště / Sandpit (2006) playing with the theme of subversive ridicule. A sequence of puns reveals a bear setting off to hang itself in the woods, or the grim reaper arriving at a cemetery on a motorbike. A year later, in the series World Records, he began working more with references to art history. Auction records, the respectability of artists (be this Vincent van Gogh or the ancient creator of Discobolus) and the incalculable nature of their works were parodied in his own records, such as installation disc throw or a bike ride during which he painting the landscape. Seriality was also present in the almost documentary cycle Front Garden Folk Art (2005), in which Tichoň photographed bizarre constellations in front gardens. These works reflect the artist’s approach to art and the creative act itself, in which one of the themes is the absence of a serious theme.

Over recent years the artist’s work has become more coherent and compact. This is also because, instead of individual series, it presents itself through installations created for a particular space. He has also brought his interest from the micro-world, focussing on secondary phenomena, topics that have a social dimension. To date, the largest such installation was the exhibition Umění, kterému nikdo nerozumí, není umění / The Art that No One Understands is not Art, in which he takes aim at artists and curators. Selected quotes taken out of context are linked only by the fact that they relate to art in urban light boxes. The texts were intended to draw attention to the absurdity of the entire system in which artists are opponents. A wallpaper made from a well known painting, supplemented by a self-moving vacuum cleaner that created an image during the exhibition itself, again ironises art as such, namely as a self-consuming activity without perspective. In contrast, in Prague’s White Room Gallery he explicitly refers to the work of Piero Manzoni and his Merda d’artista, as well as to Andy Warhol, i.e. two artists on opposite ends of the scale of popular culture. Tichoň took junk, garbage, things no one needed and wanted to get rid of. By closing them in a box that a visitor could buy for CZK 100 [EUR 3.8] he created a work of art from both the junk and the box itself. In one of his most recent exhibitions Nevědoucí nevědění / Unconscious Ignorance (2019) he drew attention to the fanaticism with which we follow the consumer world. In an oracle he had made, with an aesthetic and system of tickets and numbers reminiscent of the waiting room at a bank, local authority or post office, the viewer received answers to a range of questions dealing with such issues as love, money, health, work, etc. The system generated answers that in fact were all the slogans of international corporations. Tichoň is aware that some of the paths he has chosen may well lead nowhere. And yet he is willing to invest time and energy in them and do whatever he believes is a good idea at the time. This year he published at his own expense a catalogue of images under the title Umění je lepší než nic / Art is Better than Nothing.

TICHOŇ P.: Art is better than nothing, Praha, 2019 VAŇOUS P.: What is important is what you cant see, katalog výstavy, Galerie Dea Orh, Praha, 2010