Zdeněk Sýkora

Zdeněk Sýkora has painted his whole life. He graduates from realistic landscape shots to the geometrisation of natural forms on to cleanly laid out colour schemes and space reduction. This shape-creating process culminates in the series, Gardens (Zahrad), from 1958. It was inspired by H. Matisse. This is where the landscape is now only an impulse for the free discourse on expressive qualities freed of colour stains. In his later work he moves to the reduction of expressive resources to colourfully broad geometricised figures. These, in turn, appear in increasingly simplified compositions. Sýkora belongs among the first artists, who began to use the constructivism motif in his creations.

At the beginning of the 1960s the first „structure“ pictures began to appear. A key work in this transformation is the Grey Structure / Šedá struktura (1962-3), in which the surface is already organised into the form of a grid, a sort of field of variations of mutual positions for individual geometric elements. Sýkora works from pre-defined structures and tries later to exhaust their combinational possibilities. He ends up, for example, repeating the same shape, while his colourful arrangement with regard to neighbouring elements isunique.

Sýkora was one of the first Czech artists period to begin using, in 1964, a computer as a means for providing an otherwise unattainable range of variations and enabling the objectification of combined approaches. This established him as a pioneer in computer art. Sýkora’s work explores relations between systematicness and coincidence). Together with the mathematician, Jaroslav Blažek, and by using the LPG-30 computer, he creates programmable structures, whose objective is to exhaust all possible mutual positions for several basic elements. Whereas in previous paintings the structures were still created intuitively and were guided by an attempt to prevent repetition in the combination of images, when working with a computer, it was necessary to adopt a thorough, rational logic. The computer is thus used to implement a pre-defined concept.

In 1973 macro-structured images began to appear. This happened through the enlargement of semicircular elements. Structural lines are created, they define the boundaries between black and white elements in the pictures. They became an impulse for the creation ofline-based paintings, whose creation Sýkora works on still today. In these series of lines the annulment of ties between the limiting grid-structures occurs. The image becomes a mere slice of the whole. The initial coordinates of each line, their width, length and colour are defined at random, by a toss of the dice, or they are numbers, generated haphazardly, with the help of a computer. Colour lines exist on a white background, symbolising emptiness as a natural environment for playing out random line growth (expansion).

At the end of 1970s Sýkora’s works experience a partial return to landscapes. Parallel to paintings of structure and lines, he creates works using earth tones painted on in thick layers, in which he develops possibilities for painting that he had begun at the end of the 1950s. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s his series, Stains / Skvrny, comes about in this way. Sýkora is also the author of several architectural projects; for example, the design for the entry hall of the company, Selmoni AG, in Basil or the pictures, Flying A/Létání A and Flying B/Létání B (they come from the pictures Line No. 233 and Line No. 234), for the entry hall to the building of the Czech Republic’s National Integrated Administrative Centre for Aviation in Jeneč u Prahy.

Sýkora’s work, using the principle of guided coincidence, is interpreted as the analogical functioning of natural organisms, and the artist has allowed himself, during his whole life, to be inspired by scientific research, for example, the chaos theory.

„There are situations and phenomena unexpected and inexplicable, which out of necessity we define as coincidental. It seems a paradox that precisely in exact sciences the term coincidence has achieved such plasticity. Coincidence is precondition for too many situations. We are forced to place an increasing amount of trust therein. Each coincidence is tied to elements that can create relations. They are thus not coincidental „of themselves“, but are only very complicated, mutable relations. There must possibly be some „higher order“ that we cannot understand. And for this we can feel it even more. I think the relation, understanding – feeling, is decisive for a sense of freedom.“

Zdeněk Sýkora, 1985

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