Untitled (from the Searching in Lost Space 1993 series)

Josef Žáček wholly understood the role of the Red Army Faction urban guerrillas in Germany during the 1970s and ’80s, and managed to put himself in the place of its members’ dramatic individual fates. The R.A.F. is a risky and difficult theme full of obscure details. It is a taboo theme that is manipulated and fanatically hated. At the same time, however, it is an inexhaustible and exciting theme. Žáček doesn’t accept the simplistic stupidity of political phrases nor arrogant, elitist art for its own sake that doesn’t contribute to creating and defending freedom but irresponsibly and gutlessly seals itself off in harmless isolation, striking an uncritical accord with the parasitical nomenclature of ‘specialists’ and intellectual snobs. Žáček is an uncompromising maverick who doesn’t pull his punches. Through his paintings, he draws us into a psychotically disturbed world and its bestial brutality. He shows us the other side of the coin with which we obediently pay for our resigned day-to-day survival. He makes us feel the strength of a gesture of permanent rebellion and dissatisfaction. Several of his signs and symbols speak to us in a clear language, while with others we have to fully determine their meaning ourselves and place them in the emerged gaps and fading focal points.

The almost amorphously dark portraits of wanted members of the R.A.F. are faces of pairs from police posters. They are pervaded by the icy presence of death and bleakly anonymous blankness. The eyes are not eyes, the mouths are not mouths, the depersonalised mask-like faces resist being precisely designated. They are emptily unspecific – they are everyone’s and no one’s at the same time. They are without a past or present. They have a future that is strictly universal while also unnaturally futile and alienly absurd. The posthumous paraphrases of moribund mummies. Erstwhile people written off by bureaucracy, legally brought about from an illegal pseudo-world. Stiff beings lacking authentic meanings, indefinable snapshots from nowhere. Ghostly clones from prison cells. They are mirrors of us. The horrors of their fate are our curse. We are hostages to stereotypes forced upon us. In the noisy labyrinth of kaleidoscopic phenomena, real dreams and paranoid obsessions pass each other by. Blood becomes watered-down; frost grips the bones.

Extract from the text ‘Portraits of Outlaws’ by Milan Kozelka

In: Josef Žáček / [text Richard Drury ... et al.]
Brno : Galerie Aspekt, 2010
208 p. : il. ; 32 cm
ISBN   978-80-254-7515-7