Kvíčala Petr *1960

Hand-knotted rug, 1997

kelim, double-sided, 200 × 300 cm, Moravian Tapestry Manufactory
The starting point of Petr Kvíčala's work is the understanding of the image as a unique lyrical order - this order is not determined by a strict rule, it is the relationship between the rule and its violation or variation by the author's subjective choice is one of the dominant "contents" of the artist's work. His his beginnings as a painter and draughtsman were strongly influenced by the recognition of how with the problems of purely visual lyricism that artists a few years later earlier. First it was personal contact with the Brno-based Petr Veselý, whose his works were an example of lyrical treatment of an image preserving links to the reality he saw; the recognition of the work of the prematurely deceased Michal Ranny at his family's home in Štěpánovice confirmed for him the correctness of and the legitimacy of the path he had begun, and later showed him its limitations. Jiří Valoch In the 1980s, Petr Kvíčala, a generational related to the generation of artists of the Hardheads, developed a distinctive position of abstract geometric painting, the starting point of which became ornament as the main subject of the pictorial message. Elementary geometric shapes and symbols, such as the wave, circle, line and cross, have been have since become the artist's main means of expression, capturing archaic experience inspired by folk art through a universal geometric artistic language, the variability of which Kvíčala was able to fully exploited. In a painting entitled In June from 1988, conceived in fresh summery tones of pink and yellow, is, as in other paintings from this period, a geometric structure created by imprecise hand painting, whose irregularity and slight variations give the work a liveliness and organicity, in contrast to the geometric structure of the surface. The rhythm of the elements in the painting, their seriality, structure and development in the surface Kvíčala applied from the 1990s onwards, especially in the waveform, which enabled the creation of individual segments, but also a rich network of mutually intertwining and layered lines, which were applied during the 1990s also in large-scale commissions in architecture or textile realisations. Kvíčala repeatedly collaborated with the Moravian Tapestry manufactory in Valašské Meziříčí, which produced tapestries and tapestries based on the artistic designs of a number of contemporary artists. The red and white colour combination of the carpet with a distinctive signal impact became a major feature of the carpet in the 1990s. Transferring the motif of the waveform from paintings to textiles or architectural walls represents for Kvíčala a play on the permeability of painting into the realm of applied art, but also with transcending the limits of of the hanging painting towards space.