Two Faces of Utopia

TWO FACES OF UTOPIA

Exhibition of Dana Puchnarová, Prague

Ph Dr Jan Kříž

From the range of young artists, meritorious of Czech structural painting’s development in the early sixties, Dana Puchnarova‘s work count among its most relevant values. She joined the radical branch of that stream supported by czech cubism, in the main represented by Bohumil Kubišta. From Kubišta’s creation the young paintress not only gathered assertion of the deeply existential meaning of a picture but also a trust into higher spiritual sense in principles of formal framework.

An early interest of hers for construction could even lean against Piet Mondrian’s example of abstracting analyses. Kubišta and Mondrian only at the first view contraried one another. Anyway, both painters were considering form as a symbol of general contents, investigating the bearing capacity of ideal- spiritual projections. As early as during her school years Dana Puchnarova began to build up the ground-plan for her creation out of these traditional roots.

Many of her structural pictures belonged to the best of which that characteristic wave of our painting in the early sixties could offer. An interest for spiritual content joined with formal tokens got evinced even in the name her widescoped structural cycle Geometria Spiritualis ( 1963- 65 ). An application of geometrical figures to the abstraction of Informel type constituted no isolated case of czech art at the time. Peculiar, however, was our artist’s stressed attention to it, to be reassumed in further time by independant development of formal elements. At the beginning existential themes and psychological analysis were prevailing.

The cycle of prints for Franz Kafka’s stories by which Dana Puchnarova courageously completed her studies on the Prague Academy of Fine arts in 1964, bears any marks of czech symbolist Informel. Along with her cycle of drawings for digest of poems by František Halas named Deluge and Hunger, steaming from World War II times, through which she closed the whole epoch of her structural work in the same year.

Another important element, strongly echoing even later on in her work, seems to be her imagination’s anchoring in iconography of nature. Between 1959-1962 her cycle named STONES, imaginatively resulting from the very core of natural world, represented one of Dana Puchnarova’s ways to structural abstraction. The young paintres’s awaking universally spiritual interest looked for support and orientation in primordial shapes of nature. At the same time the purpose to set symbolical thought into a most general dimension of time, remote from the command and mystification of the given instant, showed in out line. Even prehistory got to a recalled together with a vision of far removedfuture.Insuch way the metaphysical realism of DP was born, by specific optics of critical thinking,watching actual problems from a view-point of total history of man on our planet and universe. Midst of thesixties, following the cycle for F. Halas’ poems, Spiritual Geometry got transformed into a Mechanical one- GEOMETRIA MECHANICA 1965- 66. Corresponding to a distinct stream in czech vanguarding art of the time which, in opposition to structural abstraction and its existencially tragic note, took a positive attitude towards the new time i.e. also top technical civilization.

This stream was manifestedunder the name of New Sensibility and introduced into the day’s order an elements took part of it and so it was in DP work as well.But even ther one dont meet DP name among the leading figures - as much as she would deserve it, being one of its initiators. With the New Sensibility she shared first of all the non- orthodoxal program. Geometry or general- abstract shape were aplicable means of expression and sense communication for introducing a new, positive and sentiment echoing relation to modern world’s factities.

This stream of ours resounded with a trust into increasing resistance against the fossilized regime.Changes of social conscioussnes wherein even the loose pictural forms took share, facing not only actual reforms but also ideal patterns

of a world ruled by universal life rhythmes in art. An essential contribution of hers consisted in personal evaliation of playful elements, a special kind of soft- shaped imagination,effectiveness of plain sign and intimating colorism, joyfull aproach to outer world.

If the structurally- abstractly conceived work of DP protruded oppresing melancholy of transcending spirit, the geometrizing creation of hers bears positive understanding of UTOPIAN DREAMS, towards an idea of unversal harmony fitted to overcome even the hard -line oppsites of chaos and order. Both contradictional elements are now invited to support a composition of a world well- managed be idalizing fancy. The pictures are living through a newly acquired self- confidence.The wold seems directly to wait for a lucky Utopia of abstract forms and to get opened towards its themes.

By the hope awakened by that time and the development of art DP was also guided to an expansion of her pictural and graphic work into space. Positive face of Utopia echoes not only in Geometria Mechanica but in her cycles named CURVES ( 1967- 69), SIGNS ( 1967- 70), PLAYS ) 1970- 72) and ARCHITECTOUNS ( 1971-74) as well.

The newly awakened trust in friendly symbiosis of man and world stood by the birth of her cycle UTOPEIA ( 1968-1976), which got turned into a panoramatic fresco of o our paintress’ anticipating purposes in symbolising fancy. The strenght of that imagination of hers manifested itself at last in the way she overcame, along with the major part of our painters, the tragic experience of a military Sowiet intervention 1968 by a hope which only under the stress of several following years decreased.

Gradually a lot is changing. Around the midst of the seventies an image of negative Utopia gets through. A prohibited exhibition in public, alternatively organized in private, upsets a straight conflict with the ruling power. The pictural response articulation in shape of existential drama of permanently menaced human freedom, enhanced by incumbent ecological catastrophes, comes to be reiterated in her work with Baroque pathetic and expressivity.

In her cycle MONUMENTS OF MAN ( 1978-79 ) even a Monument of Jail (1977) appears. Dreadful shapes of symbols, thoroughly crippled remnants of some body wrappings are stigmatizing a deadly landscape. Plastic imagination puts itself at disposal of summary themes as are Visions of a destroyed Planet and visions of destroyed civilization. Thetomorrow takes the shape of ecological catastrophe. The landscape is burned down by atomic dead. Monuments of Evil only remained - that of dictators and totalitarianism, last remnants of an inglorious end of all hopes.

Oppressing visions however find her opposite in ethics of a tight relationship to natural elements. The sinking creature seems to get hold on a fragile spike of grass as are remnants of nature, at least theorizing about. The will to endow her work with utmost reliability lets her look for new, by harsh naturalism appealing procedures. She is modeling for herself objects in clay, placing them into reality, photographing and photomechanical transferring her picture on surface of a print. Into gruesome- mushroom shaped heads and similar structures a grin of death is inscribed. The space is waste, the colors cold, more than non-personal, even so quasi appealing to one’s favour. Even dared fancy of disaster, tragedy and misery of human existence seems to claim a say in.

This exhibition 1993 in Prague is by none retrospective, being only a concise choice stressing an inward schism, ideal and psychological in her work. Even the last pictures belong to it, though her magical lucidity of dim or half transparent paper and folios shift the expression to a level of spiritual search, indicating an only suspected mystical underground of the fragile human being. But even this follows from operating of inward polarities, which in recent works interfere one with another.

Along with the science fiction the future appears in manifold features in the domain of plastic symbols- as a possibility for realizing Good and Evil or Evil or Good alone and Evil alone : the later awaking most dreadful anxieties. To set good things only is much less verisimilar than to enforce evil ones, for the evil aims to some absolute and the realization of which seem to dispose of any technical presuppositions in our days.

The work of Dana Puchnarová was several times marked by creative unrest, even nervosity of the time. Its thoughtful ground- plan, passionate and open engagement in human things are representing one of the most authentic spiritual constructions of Czech Art during the last thirty years