JAN KOBLASA A SONIIA JAKUSCHEWA

Art must be both laughter and tears. it must have human warmth. it must be touched. over the entire surface of the mould. processed deep into the microstructures. and it must have such a large and clear shape in order to become a human. a mountain. a tree. a star, and the opposite of all that. and the opposite of the opposite. and ... (Jan Koblasa, 1965)

The exhibition Dialogues, featuring the works of Jan Koblasa and Sonia Jakuschewa is dedicated to the work of two people, whose careers met and whose artistic paths merged in some respects in 1993. It represents a "dialogue" of two great creative energies, each of which is drawing from the depths of the artist’s own experience, yet they flow together, meet, encourage each other, and sometimes result in a joint work of art. It is a "dialogue" of the male and the female element, two internal forces having a lot in common while being quite different. They come from different generations, they are based on different cultural and artistic traditions, him being a Bohemia, her being a Russian, both coming from the former Eastern Bloc, which they both left, him in 1968, her more than twenty years later, to meet in the German city of Hamburg. But how much self-denial and inner courage is needed for an artist to overcome the hardships of emigration and intently resume one’s work? And how does it feel for a man to be home both here and there, being a bit of a stranger everywhere?


It is not necessary to introduce Jan Koblasa (1932) on the Czech art scene. Since 1989, his work has been mapped by numerous exhibitions here; from the most recent ones, let us at least mention his retrospective at the Prague Castle Riding School. His autobiographical diaries, emerging on the shelves of bookstores at intervals specified by the speed of the artist's inventiveness, are always welcome by the general audience and always sold out. The personality of Jan Koblasa simply combines a variety of talents that make him essential to our cultural scene. Besides the talent for fine arts, he also possesses musical and literary talent, crowned by the power of a sensitive and generous person, determined seeker of both the beauty and dark sides of life, a tireless warrior with a poetic soul. Travelling in Italy in August 1968, reached by the news of the occupation of Czechoslovakia, he decided not to return home. He was granted asylum in Northern Germany, and in 1969 he founded the studio of free sculpture at the Muthesius Hochschule in Kiel. He then led the studio for nearly thirty years. As one of the few émigrés, Jan Koblasa managed to somehow naturally enter the international scene, earn the respect of the professional community and influence generations of young artists.
 
Koblasa’s creative journey represents an inspiring synthesis of reflections on us, people, and on the role that we have in this world; it is always filled to the brim with the experiences of music, literature and philosophy. It is a great return to ancestral myths and archetypes, in which we find analogies with the feelings of contemporary people. The themes of the Earth, Heaven, Hell and Paradise are omnipresent in Koblasa’s ideas like a red thread. Angels float above while Apocalyptic scenes emanate from the depths of the Earth. A significant theme which can be identified in his works from the 1960s are the motifs of Kings, Prophets, Guardians and Lament, followed by characters from Greek mythology (Ulysses), topics from the world of opera and theatre (The Two Widows, The Mastersingers of Nurnberg, Actors, Spectators), but also those of street actors and musicians (Pankov), which Koblasa has been creating with a youthful verve in his studio since the 1970s until today. Regardless of the chosen material, which may be wood, bronze, alabaster, stone, with its surface gently smoothed or brutally chopped, regardless of whether the sculptures are silent, curled into themselves (Attempt at a Smile), or whether they scream and expand into space (Punks), Koblasa’s sculptures have in common the sense of the relationship of their internal message, their shape, the material used, and its treatment. This is what gives the works of Jan Koblasa the ability to provoke inexhaustible imagination and the power of communication which prompts us to experience them again and again with an equally voracious passion that inspired their coming to existence.


The Czech visitors might have familiarized themselves with the works of the painter, sculptor and visual poet Sonia Jakuschewa (1961) during Jan Koblasa‘s retrospective at the Prague Castle Riding School, where the artists introduce several of their joint works - a set of sculptures titled Angels (2010). Jakuschewa‘s works, which centres on painting, is largely unknown here. The exhibition provides a more complete view of the work of this distinctive artist, namely in confrontation with the sculptures of Jan Koblasa, in the proximity of which, sometimes in synergy, but often the shadow of which, her works were created.
 
While being a student a student at the „Surikov“ Moscow Academy of Fine Arts, Sonia Jakuschewa became a member of the progressive stream of Russian painters, who radically opposed official art. However, her painting is also progressive in another respect. It oscillates between two poles, both of which it fully fills and inhabits. On the one, it is represented by colourful expressive paintings, on the other hand by contemplative white, grey and black monochromes. Both positions share an interest in monumental painting gesture, sometimes sharp as a vibrant cluster of energy, sometimes quiet and still, floating freely in space.


Expressive colour images from the Red Landscapes, Russian Landscape or Garden series originated mainly in the first half of the 1990s, a time when Jakuschewa lived in Moscow and subsequently moved to Hamburg. They represent a live eruption of colours and emotive celebration of life, using large brush strokes laid with astonishing generosity and courage. The dynamics of these paintings is enhanced by intense red tones building the surface of the painting or used as a local accent. Older paintings represent an elaborate solid space, opening into other dimensional plans, swirling and reaching out of the canvas towards the viewer. Over time, the brush strokes seem to gouge out of the canvas, gaining greater autonomy, resulting in the works from the most recent years in colourful diagonal flows of energy rippling on the surface of the painting like streams of water, air, the life-giving forces of nature (Landscapes from the years 2010-2014).


The second pole of Sonia Jakuschewa‘s painting is represented by monochromes built on mutual dialogue of structured and smooth surfaces. The spectators are not aroused by the communication of colours and their associative processes, but by concentrating their mind on so-called no-colours - black, white, or grey to silver or slightly ochre tone – are put into a state of silence and maximum concentration. Impasto painting fields, ribbed by embossed lines or structured by grainy grids, combine the principle of the organic and the inorganic world. Rectangular shapes or soft amorphous forms emerge from the intangible space like earthy ancient structures of nature and resonate as forces of life in the quiet infinity. Depending on the angle of the viewer's perspective and the changes in lighting conditions, the impasto strokes transform, disappear and again grow in intensity, similarly to the changing of nature, the origin and passing of human life, the elusive flow of time in the midst of the eternity of the universe.
In 1992, Sonia Jakuschewa met Jan Koblasa as an art scholar. First, their relationship was forming remotely through a frequent exchange of letters. Sonia Jakuschewa used these letters as material and source of inspiration for a new series of works, namely paintings based on the content and visual properties of characters and text (from the series ... Far Away from Moscow ... Love Letters / Memories). Blown-up letters, torn into fragments and pasted onto the canvas using the method of collage, create a structure the artistic quality of which is determined Koblasa‘s calligraphic handwriting, in-word phrasing, the rhythm in which the fragments are arranged, the alternation of different character sizes and the overall horizontal layout. Looking closely, the spectators can discover the meaning of the words, perceive their shape and the content they convey; from a distance they may get carried away by the purely aesthetic message of the already undecipherable structure without diminishing the initial concept. 


The interpretation of Koblasa‘s letters resulted in further possibilities of the development of the visual language of both artists in identical direction. In accordance with the principle Koblasa‘s work and his sense of mastery of the three-dimensional space, the Angels set was created in the Hamburg studio (2010 - 2014), with the wooden bodies is covered with texts. Just like time, history and human experience are layered, similarly to the petals of gold embellishing the surfaces of ancient sculptures, Jakuschewa covers the corpuses of angels with scraps of letters addressed to her by her husband. The characters, form and internal message are merged into one. Who would not remember the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word ..." Who would not remember Corinthians: "So now faith, hope, and love abide; ..."? No matter whether the subtle angels of Jan Koblasa and Sonia Jakuschewa levitate with protectively outstretched wings or whether they are absorbed in contemplation, they awaken in us the sensibility to the perception of phenomena which are undoubtedly present, regardless of whether their existence can be empirically verified or not.

Ilona Víchová