Texts for exhibitions

pavelKryz

"BEATA SOLITUDO"/ Blissful Solitude, Ground Floor Gallery, New Town Hall, Prague, 2022

Pavel Kryz belongs to the generation that emerged in the 1980s. Over time, it turned out that it produced a number of distinctive individuals who gradually took different paths. Kryz focuses on various themes such as people, landscapes, still life and ornament. He draws not only on contemporary reality, but also on the development of visual art in past epochs or on the principles applied in other creative fields, especially in film narratives, from which he chooses specific moments that are characteristic for them.

His work is very pleasing, representing diverse situations of everyday life. It radiates comfort, but it also reflects the tension that dominates the contemporary world. It looks at today's society with a slight irony, with a subtly critical approach to everything that surrounds us, that makes up our environment. It takes inspiration from today's lifestyle with its material abundance and at the same time its superficiality, stemming from the desire to achieve goals as easily as possible.

Pavel Kryz is able to sensitively capture the seemingly simple path to success, which, however, can be associated with an inner emptiness. His paintings, or whole series of them, in which the stories take place, have several layers of meaning. At first glance they appear calm and friendly, but at the same time they may conceal dramatic events.

An important theme that Pavel Kryz deals with is intimacy. Perhaps it is much more difficult to achieve in today's distracted and yet materially oriented way of life than in times when life was much more modest. Some of the paintings are romantic, a bit like dreams, through which we can detach ourselves from everyday reality, from the mundane activities that fill most of our time.

Pavel Kryz's paintings are rather classical in their approach to themes and technical solutions, but they attract attention mainly because of their distinctive perception of relationships between people and their feeling for capturing the atmosphere.

PhDr. J. Machalický

Pavel KRYZ - AD REM, K things, Pecka Gallery 14.9. - 1.10.2020

Pavel Kryz this time exhibits a collection of paintings from the last few years, in which his rich imagination is manifested, with which he combines seemingly unconnected motifs. His paintings have a pleasant atmosphere and portray seemingly mundane yet always somewhat mysterious situations. In this way, he continues the still living legacy of magical realism of the beginning of the last century, which surprised with strange, unexpected and at first sight incomprehensible relationships.

In Pavel Kryz's paintings, ordinary events are intertwined with stories that can be almost disturbing, raising uncertainty and questions about what will or could happen, and what the relationships might suggest.

In this way, the painter arouses our curiosity and develops the imagination of viewers, who can daydream over the paintings, contemplate them or enjoy their mood. And everyone can imagine the continuation of the stories according to their own experience, depending on how rich their imagination is. Pavel Kryz's work proves that the contemporary view of our environment, the contemporary world, can be impressively expressed not only through new media, but also through classical means of expression, i.e. in his case through drawing and painting. His paintings attract attention because they are based on everyday situations, which are, however, portrayed in unexpected contexts.

PhDr. J. Machalický

"The Perfect World" Galerie NoD

The theme of the "perfect world" is based on the current lifestyle, when the whole society is largely dominated by advertising, when "successful people" go on holidays to exotic destinations in order to escape for a moment from the empty world of business or politics to even emptier relaxation in luxury hotels by luxuriously equipped beaches. But then they soon return to the everyday reality of endless meetings and deliberations. Many artists respond in various ways to today's prevailing lifestyle, in which content and meaning often disappear and whose actors rush from one pointless meeting or discussion to another with the feeling that they are perhaps working. Yet somewhere in the depths of their souls they must feel the utter emptiness with which they will eventually reach their destination, only to have the lids of their coffins slammed shut behind them, leaving nothing positive behind except their vast fortunes or debts.

PhDr. J. Machalický

To the exhibition of paintings in Kutná Hora

A. Rezler, Felix Jenewein Gallery of Kutná Hora, Vlašský dvůr, 6.5. - 24.5.2009

Painter Pavel Kříž was born in 1959 in Prague. He studied painting in the studio of Professor Karel Souček at the Prague Academy in 1978-1984. From the academy, Kříž takes with him an inclination towards figurative painting and cyclicality, and perhaps the influence of a former member of the group 42 towards Kříž's contemporary civilian subject matter. His experience as a restorer and his contact with historical architecture, from which he adopts a sense of order and decor, also influenced his free work. These influences, however, became more apparent in his painting in the years before 2000. The basis of all his work, along with drawing, is a sense of colour and a full understanding of painterly expression.

Since 1985 Pavel Kříž has been exhibiting independently (e.g.Writers, 1985; Institute of Macromolecular Chemistry of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, 1987), in the 1990s mainly in newly established private Prague galleries with a clearly profiled exhibition profile, such as Galerie Béhémot (1992), Galerie Pecka (1996, 1998, 2005), Galerie Nová síň (1994), and in the last exhibition of this kind, a presentation at the Václav Špála Gallery (2006). Although Pavel Kříž is also involved in drawing and sculpture, painting remains his domain.

If we have the opportunity to observe the forms of contemporary painting, we are able to become aware of the sources that always influence a particular work and artist. In recent years there seems to be a growing tendency and need in painting to express itself in actual ways on the question of experiencing intimacy. The French sociologist Henri-Pierre Jeudy classifies today's political escapades, media reality shows and the current trivialisation of privacy in order to provoke collective emotions and fill the void of public life as a triumph of demagogy. Art, as a reflection of its time, works with what is offered to it and deftly uses its ability to aestheticize phenomena however negative.

Paintings by Pavel Kříž can be counted among the paintings reacting to the antagonisms of the flamboyance of the times, the unanchoredness of the individual through scenes full of nostalgia, purposeful loneliness, rare moments of relaxation in combination with their placement in a kind of cut-up shots relying on film and photographic visuality. Since 2005, Kříž has mastered the technique of painting in a combination of watercolour and acrylic, which transcribes the chosen scene as if in the form of a photographic record blurred in several outlines intertwined in solarising veils. Formally, however, the painting is completely autonomous, full of certainty, a sense of detail and composition.

From the earlier loose strategy of the fanciful rhythmic painting Beach from 2004, which refers to even looser painting methods, we chronologically arrive at the works from 2005. Cooler subtle tones of green and grey-blue transparent blurred surfaces sound refined (Letná, Pohoda, 2005) in natural scenes with figurative stagings. A special category is represented by a group of paintings, from 2006-2009, which partly in form but also in content refer to examples of American realism of the interwar and post-war years, working with feelings of loneliness and isolation. Pavel Kříž's paintings Pause (2008), In the Room (2009) may remind us of the paintings of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) or Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009). Their nostalgia, melancholic beauty of everyday life, anonymous figures in strange perspectives and strange lighting.

The somewhat calculating "beach paintings" such as Interview (2008) or Nude (2008), another of Cross's series, recall the names of Mark Peterson, Daniel Pollera, and Eric Fischl. The exoticism of sun and sea may have become commonplace today, but it remains an enticing escape from reality. The attractiveness of this content is well known to the authors of so-called "American beach painting" or "coastal landscape art". Cross's nudity and eroticism of sunny beaches, however, lacks Fischl's controversy and does not evoke social apathy towards perverted relationships; rather, it sounds documentary, relaxed and encourages the perception of colour. American beach painting has been associated formally with various manifestations of realism, from hyperrealism to its freer and more personal transcriptions, as is the case with Pavel Kříž. It is clear that the domestic tradition is being transcended in Czech art today and that contemporary Czech painting has a chance to engage with international contexts, as it did well in the early twentieth century in the awakening modernist movement.

Past face

Tomas Pospiszyl, Reflex 1994

Prague artist Pavel Kříž in Nová síň gallery

Past Face

An empty gallery is the most empty space imaginable. In an empty gallery, nothing is perfect, just deafening emptiness and stabbing light. Only when the artist's thoughts, paintings and sculptures bring shape, colour and life. The empty gallery is a shell, a bubble that separates the outside world from the world of the artwork and the artist. It must be able to let itself be imprinted with the artist's idea. It's drizzling outside, the first umbrellas are opening. Inside the New Hall Gallery is still empty. Painter Pavel Kříž may have more success abroad than in the Czech Republic. If the commercial success and the number of large exhibitions for the world and art makes any sense at all. The first time I visited him in his studio, he and I were crammed into a small room, a dozen paintings and drawings full of subtle silhouettes and thirteen hundred faces of the now half-forgotten Hollywood star of the 1920s, Gloria Swanson.

Forgotten Stars

More than a year ago, Pavel Kříž discovered in his friend's antique shop a set of period postcards of American film stars of the silent era, which in their time represented today's monographs of famous actors and promoted, in the true sense of the word, the cult of individual stars. Their names today often say nothing even to a film scholar; under their faces we can no longer recall any film, any life story. But what time has failed to obscure, even after seventy years, is the aura of a star, the uniqueness of a face already forgotten. "When I was given a date for an exhibition at the Nová síň gallery, I was able to fill it with my already finished paintings. But the large white walls of the gallery inspired me to create an installation designed for this space and no other." "Last but not least, the possibility and desire to use the gallery as an unusual studio also played a role." Just as the original postcard was multiplied into thousands of copies, Pavel Kříž wants to multiply the photographic reproduction of the half-forgotten actress into huge sails, from floor to ceiling filling the gallery. The Hollywood star and her gaze, so unique, suddenly find themselves in the situation of the crucified Christ, of whom there are hundreds in the church at once. How does the actress's gaze change when it is repeated hundreds of times? Will she tell us more about her life, her voluntary and perhaps involuntary pose? "In the end, the whole project crystallized into nine hundred and sixty-eight faces of Gloria Swanson, which are hung in three parts on the gallery walls. I covered the glued photographs with ornamental overpainting."

Three days in the gallery

Plans become reality. The first photographs lie on the empty and white gallery floor and are glued together to form the final sails, measuring six by ten metres. Pavel Kříž has three days and three nights to complete his work. The gallery turns into an operating theatre, the dazzling and somewhat sterile whiteness is disturbed only by the figure of the artist and his assistants. Only now is the painter able to see the work in progress at its true size, at a scale that will guide his own repainting of the faces.The faces are glued together side by side, creating a pictorial grid in their multiplicity. In the studio, the actual installation of the exhibition could have been prepared theoretically, but now it's really getting underway. Fixing a ten-metre paper sheet, glued together from hundreds of parts, to the wall is no easy task. It turns out that the rail for attaching the paintings is at a different height than the artist aimed for many weeks ago. The method of hanging the sails will have to be changed. Even the artist had no idea how the faces would look in the final quantity next to each other, the final effect may turn out to be banal. It may not be realistic, for technical and time reasons, to create a painting of the entire upcoming surface. The photos cover the floor like a carpet. Holding a bucket of blue paint, the artist stands in the middle of the faces as if in the sea. The ornament thickens, the surface is restless. The ornaments ripple lightly over a thousand faces like the ripples of the sea over the face of the drowned.

Message

The face of a now nameless Hollywood star, repeated a thousand times over, captured by an unknown and most likely now-defunct photographer, mechanically and unapologetically printed by an anonymous printing press, tells the story of our century. All that remains is a pose, an artfully staged studio shot that has managed to completely empty itself over the years. We put our own interpretations into it, which have no choice but to differ from reality, from the truth. How many times have we seen similar lists of faces, walls full of names of victims from concentration camps, hundreds, thousands, millions of different faces, different fates and stories. They all merge into one single one, can be replaced by one single face. Pavel Kříž never tried to find out the exact fate of the actress Gloria Swanson. It's not even relevant to his work. What matters is her gaze, her fate as an artificial Hollywood idol, the star principle, the reproduced deity, the myth under the magnifying glass.

Tomas Pospiszyl

P.S. Gloria Swanson was one of the queens of 1920s Hollywood. She started out as one of Mack Sennet's legendary "bathing beauties", then starred in Charlie Chaplin's films. In the first half of the 1920s she created a number of film roles in which she portrayed the ideal of the modern emancipated woman. She played the story of an aging actress in Sunset Boulevard. Gloria Swanson died in 1983 at the age of eighty-six. Back in 1975, she starred in the popular disaster film Airport.

Movie stars age in secret

Petr Nedoma, Formalia 1994, atelier

In the beginning there was an unknown to us, but nevertheless a real woman - an actress. She was photographed and began to function as a movie star. She turned into an icon. The aim was not only to reproduce her face and appearance, although the reproduction itself, in the case of the star, deliberately multiple, stops time and transforms the living reality into an emblem distinctively arranged, modified and thoughtfully manipulated towards some imaginary ideal. The first and decisive step towards creating an aura of sacredness by manipulating reality into the form, shape, manner of an icon, a "holy" image, an idealized reality, was taken, among other things, by way of reproduction. The sign of the idealized woman, torn from her original uniqueness and at the same time from her everyday multiplicity, was created by manipulating reality and intended to manipulate reality. A photograph of a real woman was intended as an ideal to influence the environment. In the spirit of modernism, the woman became a proxy, a model, an icon or an idol for many other women (and men). With the passage of time, the sign, the photograph, functions like any other reality. For example, by its factual existence enriched by an extended sematic field created by its duration in time.

Today Pavel Kříž presents this reality, artistically processed, as a new reality with awareness of their character values. References about the real woman in the photograph are secondary. What matters is the reality of the photograph, which is treated as a real existing character. "Reality is a game of signs, and art as a game with signs is real only as part of this game." (St. Hubík, Postmodern Culture, p.45) This game does not bring new themes, but only reveals what modernism has consistently covered up with ideologization, which always likes to work with sign simplification.

Cross quite naturally abandons practice and working with the living model. His starting point is not "nature", but the already formed (and used) product, the original concreteness and uniqueness of which can be heard in his work only as a distant echo. Photography grasped in this way is much closer to the virtual reality of today's computer-generated artificial world than to a specific woman somewhere in the beginning, who, moreover, we can almost certainly say is now dead. Despite the well-known fact that movie stars age in secret. The creation of idols, stars, character figures was done by emphasizing an aura of uniqueness and uniqueness, a distance from everyday life. At the same time, however, it was again aimed at the most ordinary day, where the idol, on the basis of contrast, teased and urged to follow. That is to say, to make the emblem a prototype.

Although W. Benjamin feared that the aura of uniqueness of the work would be lost or abolished by easy reproduction, the masmedia, which certainly includes photography used in this way, on the contrary created the aura by endless reproduction. The hidden treasure has only an imaginary value. The aura of an icon was also created by the physical unavailability of the real actress. Properly used, the relics of magical thinking in the layers of the unconscious of the consumers do their work and the proxy image itself begins to shine with a golden glow. "Golden snakes poop golden" (P. Nikl).

However, with today's overuse of signs, created on the principle of a single code, their aura is disappearing again, the signs are becoming trivialised and dissolving into the commonplace again. The cross goes against the tide of this phenomenon. Just by using an old photograph from a time when today's overproduction was not yet working. Plus, he relied on spiritualizing the old photo in a time when, although it was a factory reproduction, it was once again unique with a heightened aura. The principle of Kříž's work is the reproduction of an aurated reproduced image of a now completely indifferent unknown woman. Her place in the world at the time is now only imagined and is only hinted at in the form of a reproduced portrait. That is to say, according to the degree of the emblematic nature of her portrayal. In retrospect, we try to reconstruct the original unreduced reality from the sign.

Contemporary art already works on the axis of sign - sign and not in the modernist code of reality - sign. (The situation could be complicated by the consideration of photography, the sign, as a new reality). In the relation sign - sign, of which Kříž is fully aware, the problem of the representation of reality, or in this case more precisely (even) the reproduction of reality, disappears. What is essential is the tension between the sign, the original photograph, and the newly created sign, the work of art. Cross multiplies this principle not only by multiplying the original (already once reproduced) sign, but also by creating repeated drawing signs - a grid surrounding and often overlapping the face of the diva.

Petr Nedoma

White as an ornament

Anna Irmanova, 1998, Pecka-White Gallery

After a series of blue and yellow canvases (exhibited in previous years), Pavel Kříž abandoned the issue of the colourful surface and decided to express himself in a clear and transparent way. Even the title of the exhibition, White/White, suggests the importance of abandoning colour, for as we know, white is not a colour.

The technique of rhythmic ornamentation may seem like a simplistic expression, but upon prolonged observation, the viewer is struck by the degree of lively and dynamic decorativeness encountered even on a white surface. Pavel Kříž's predilection for classical ornament encourages him to greater and greater virtuosity. As if the creation of the ornament itself were not enough work in itself, the artist also inserts an exciting drawing into the composition, which makes the painting restless.

The whole composition then takes on an almost op-art effect of undulating reality. Unlike the blue and yellow compositions, which are made present by the colour itself, the white paintings are born as if on the edge of reality.

The facets in the painting act like reflections in different mirrors, both being and not being distinct, creating a new space or enveloping it even more in fantasies and dreams. The combination of drawing and painting evokes Chinese ink painting, the ornament points to a meditative creation that allows for infinite rhythm and continuation. The exhibition could just as well be a musical notation of an endless composition. Pavel Kříž's exhibition "White" is a dream of an exhibition of ornamental work that does not want to remain on the level of a decorative element.

Anna Irmanova

Microscopic tissue of images. M.Juříková,1996,Pecka Gallery exhibition 9X

The painter Pavel Kříž (born 1959) is exhibiting at the Pecka Gallery from 15 July to 4 August. He is one of the interesting solo artists of our contemporary art scene. His presence in this gallery confirms the now obvious and sympathetic effort of the owner and curator Jaroslav Pecka to present remarkable personalities standing outside the mainstream and working in seclusion. At the very beginning of his professional career, Pavel Kříž stood at the opposite pole from the majority of the 1980s generation. He concentrated on contemplative painting summarizing the experience of the urban structure of the landscape. The heavy, earthy tones soon lightened and an atmosphere similar to the meditative tragedy of Mark Tobey entered his paintings. However, this essentially calligraphic technique has always had a distinctly individual handwriting and expression. The laboriously and concentrated structure does not leave the space of his paintings to this day. In 1994 he presented himself in the New Hall with an interesting project in which he used photographic imagery. He surrounded a multiplied portrait of one of the first stars of American cinema - Gloria Swanson - with bright blue gestural spinning. At the time, he considered the problem of identity through the likeness of a famous but under-exploited media personality. The serial multiplication of the antiquarian portrait of the soulful and now mysterious actress caused an oscillation between the categories of lost, past and current, just projected time. The paintings of the Nine X series at the Peck Gallery also come from similar impulses. However, unlike the "pilot" project, the author works with nine more archival portraits. As the title suggests, this time he intends to radically deny identity. It disappears not only through multiple repetitions and manipulation of the image, but above all under the veil of the complex score of the author's manuscript. Each of the portraits has a specific ornamental grid and colour chord. Only some of the details of the likenesses remain uncovered by the web of ink and brushstrokes, and their repeated cutting is an organic part of the texture of each painting. Once again, Cross concentrates on the process of image making itself, as it was before the New Hall presentation. Nevertheless, his painting does not remain just a beautiful material of artfully and sensitively stacked structures. The artist manages to apply many layers of his own visual experience, which fixes all the remarkable structures around us - in the landscape as a whole, in nature and its details, in objects and their fragments. But it is not only the energy with which he produces the almost microscopic tissue of his paintings that pulses towards the viewer. At the same time, it intuitively reflects a sense of uncertainty and doubt about authenticity, originality and identity that hits us along with a slight sentiment over the revelation of a past identity.

Magdalena Juříková

Painting Transformations of Pavel Kriz, J.Kapusta junior, 2006

Painting Transformations of Pavel Kriz

Pavel Kříž (Kryz) graduated in 1984 from the studio of figurative painting of Karel Souček at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He left the school and began his artistic career as a painter of his time, but not a victim of the influences and pressures that affected his generation until the mid-1980s. He relied on his own feelings, opinions and artistic tradition. At that time he was already restoring murals, mostly ornaments in classical architecture. Intuitively, he perceived and accepted the order, structurality and linearity of the buildings in which he worked and their predominantly decorative decoration. The influence of architecture found expression in his drawings, prints and paintings in the general grid, the basic structure of the work; the details of architecture and the chained ornaments of painting were then reflected in their detail, rhythm and colour. This is characteristic of the paintings of the late 1980s, built on the principle of multiplication of a partial motif and its rhythmic repetition throughout the pictorial surface. Sometimes monumentalizing shape and linear rhythm and geometric rigor took over, but more often a free, nervous drawing rose beneath them, transforming the feelings of historical ornaments and patterns, for whose aesthetic abilities and effect he showed great appreciation. These playful images, created with patience and gusto, were entirely rooted in the mentality of the draughtsman.

Since 1990, a hitherto latent painterly sensuality has been bubbling to the surface of the paintings. The more colour-specific surfaces bear the brushwork of content derived from nature. Sensuality and sensuality permeate the canvases through abstracted floral inspirations and women drawn from photographs. The recurring sign, now also newly geometric-abstract and figurative, in a different perspective, communicates a painterly saturation with a predominantly colourful and subtle background. The paintings of the 1990s are a harmonization of transpositions of decorative patterns, geometric abstraction and drawing and painting creations. On their own, then, the paintings stand alone, reckoning with the contrast of flat photography and painting applied to it in a curiously spatial and ornamental expression. It is all too apparent, however, that Kříž's painting remains for the time being a richly dynamic, mostly monochromatic drawing in color organized, limited and balanced by ornamental and geometric order.

In 2001, Pavel Kříž painted the watercolour paintings Apples and Pears. They differed from the previous ones in that for the first time, other than the application of a photograph of a female nude, they affected reality in a painterly way. In addition, he let the colour run off the fruit, completely against his custom, without direction. He repeated this process in other paintings. Although they still retained the look and mood of more or less loose wallpaper patterns or roller-laid mural decors, they marked a turning point in his painting. Although non-violent, they nevertheless pervasively disrupted his hitherto cultivated and cherished artificial order of flawless, aesthetically and technically perfect decorativeness by painting freely. Since 2003, he has created a series of paintings in watercolour on tinted gesso, in which he has gradually loosened and eradicated everything that had hitherto been composed in a supremely serious and balanced manner in his paintings.The handwriting loses its solidity and colour discipline and is increasingly loosened in an unbound but confident painting, eventually displacing even photography. Even individual motifs are repeated only to a limited extent, and he began to ingeniously revive his painting.

Pavel Kříž always judged that a painting belongs to people and that it should bring them joy and pleasure. This idea was also fulfilled from the beginning. Therefore, he did not embody what irritates, stresses, troubles people. His work was clearly conditioned by the ancient aesthetics of wall ornament in residential interiors. He let himself be captured by beauty and artistry and purposefully sought to humanize the art of today by creating a harmonious contrast between traditional art and contemporary thinking and painting. It is good to see how he experienced the joy of ornament in his own pictorial adaptations in both its static and undulating renditions. He also clearly demonstrated his relationship to the figure by inserting beautiful female bodily forms into his paintings using the principle of collage. He treated them as he needed at the moment, i.e. just as an ornament, a perfect bodily sign, a symbol animating the painter's reality and developing it into another reality.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Pavel Kříž created a geometric-decorative world with multiplied vegetal and figurative elements throughout the work, a landscape of pure artistry in which he encompassed what he subsequently embodied in a newly relaxed painterly language. In 2004, he seemed to have forgotten what he had done before. He painted the Mountains several times. Summary views of snow-covered mountain panoramas accentuating the restless contour line of the horizons and cold vast expanses of the valleys. Here, the transposition of the reality of mountain relief into soft, colourfully spare images without perspective allowed him a beautiful Japanizing calligraphic stylisation. He was similarly successful in his paintings of puppies in the snow. Then he painted Odalisque and Venus, impressive variations on the female nudes of the Classical and Renaissance masters Ingres and Giorgione, with unfussy, immediate assurance, expanding the solid classical painting with relaxed, joyful poses. Other paintings were created, the outline-concentrated figural portrait of Hana and the painterly supreme Cakes, already completely free of decorative backgrounds.

Sometime shortly after 2000, Pavel Kříž painted Sunday Afternoon. With this painting, the mood, the atmosphere of the place, and generally daily feelings began to play a stimulating role in his work. The immediate stimuli for the paintings are naturally related to their variety of subject matter. Its consequence is the definitive rejection and disintegration of the hitherto universal binding structure of the work, resulting in the blurring of compositional boundaries, drawing and the birth of impressionistic, lyrically expressive painting. The painter enters into different stylistic waters and changes the manuscript and colour diction of urban landscapes with a human element from case to case, perhaps even diametrically. The feelings and moods of the time of day, the atmospheric state and the constellation of the place, however, are always transferred onto canvas and paper in a relaxed manner, with painterly gusto.

In the last year he has been creating inspirations for his impressions artificially. Programmatically, he builds on the contrast of sharpness and softness of forms and lines and goes further in the destruction of reality. He extracts from the television screen any moment of the reality of human life or the environment distorted by the camera, and uses the computer to process the blurred details through the optics of the eye. He feels and perceives the mediated figurative reality as an abstraction, just like the historical ornament that used to play a similar role on the walls. From the beginning of his creative journey, Pavel Kříž has applied the principle that is the essence of fine art, which consists in the balance of the embodied reality - the degree of its stylization and the decorative component of the work. He allowed himself enough time to understand and verify this principle, so the development of his work proceeded slowly, with certainty. He is one of the artists liberated by sincere creative joy.

Jan Kapusta Ml.