JAN RAJLICH ml. - Ma(i)croworld
For more than six decades, the work of graphic designer, painter and pedagogue Jan Rajlich Jr. (* 1950) has been associated with the cultural environment of the city of Brno, which was to a great extent co-created by his father, Jan Rajlich Sr. (1920-2016), graduate of the School of Arts in Zlín. From an early age, Jan Rajlich Jr. showed an intense interest in art-related activities. Already his first drawings from the preschool period clearly manifested his artistic talent and ability to concisely capture calm natural sceneries and the bustle of the city. Gradually, with a great bravado, he was able to deal with a number of art techniques (markers, oil pastels, gouache, collages) in distinctly expressive drawings as well as in densely coloured compositions.
Drawing has always dominated Rajlich's creative career. Even before he started his university studies in architecture at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Brno University of Technology (1968–1974), drawing served him as a tool in his attempts to grasp the surrounding world as a graphic artist. During his university studies, he learned a number of skills which he later used both in freelance and applied works, such as a highly developed sense of precise drawing. He used this ability during the early years of his collaboration with his father on graphic design assignments, creating brands, logotypes, or signage systems.
During the first seven years after graduation, Jan Rajlich worked at the State Project Institute of Commerce in Brno and at the same time started discovering the field of graphic design. In the second half of the 1970s, he became more interested in the technique of oil painting and took part in several exhibitions of Brno-based artists with his works. His works from that period show a deepening effort for a more intense reflection of the relationship between man and the urban environment. In his works, he devoted an ever-increasing space for capturing urban traffic through the depiction of human figures, and it can be said that in a way he artistically thematized the issue of (mass) communication.
His artistic activity falls into the period of early postmodernism, the heterogeneous stimuli of which Rajlich did not avoid, on the contrary, he was able to creatively adapt and transform them in his works. The topic of modern civilization and interpersonal communication later became the focal point of his interest for many decades. Rajlich became a silent observer of the colourful, dynamically energetic and often comically confusing world around us, which he „commented“ and interpreted in his drawings and paintings using a typically ironic tone.
The style of Jan Rajlich's paintings was partly inspired by the work of the Austrian postmodern architect, painter and graphic artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, mainly due to the almost psychedelic combination of colours or stylization and use of irregular and organic shapes. However, Rajlich went even further and enhanced his compositions with lettristic elements consisting of fragments of conversations or even Dadaist automatic texts. This element became characteristic especially for his large-format serigraphs, the meaning of which was consequently shifted from graphic to poetic level.
The second half of the 1980s brought new energy to Rajlich's work thanks to the potential of computers. For a long time, he had been interested in new technology and its possibilities, as well as in the works of artists who used computers for creative work. He first applied his work with digital images in his original art works and, since the mid-1990s, also in his graphic designs. In his first computer works, he used software for scanning physical drawings, which he subsequently fragmented using various types of mosaics, a technique which produced a wide range of variations of the original motif. He then printed the newly created works and selected suitable motifs for his own work. The possibility to create with the help of a computer further expanded Jan Rajlich’s artistic register. It was typical for him that, in these experiments, he did not try to deny the formal imperfection of the emerging technique; on the contrary, he used the raw and rough appearance of the pixelated image as a new expressive element in his compositions.
Jan Rajlich's present-day artworks continue to develop the creative and compositional approaches he had mastered in previous decades. He still utilizes unusual deconstructive fragmentation of surfaces, and his large-format serigraphs often work on the principle of "two views". In practice, this means that when viewed from a distance, seeing the image of the macro world, the requirements of graphic design and of the poster medium come into focus – communication using distinctive clearly legible signs and symbols. Looking closely at the imaginary microworld, on the other hand, they fall apart into living image fragments that pulsate with their own communication energy. They combine the subtle poetics of dramas of characters, portrayed in filigree hand drawings, appearing in Brueghel-like picturesque scenes. An almost inseparable element of these compositions is the presence of written text and typography, using either imaginative automatic texts or reflecting the sharp humour, sarcasm and exaggeration, so typical of Jan Rajlich. As a result, his work remains distinctive, contemporary and inspiring even for today's times, over-saturated with communication.
The Ma(i)croworld exhibition presents a retrospective of the work of Jan Rajlich Jr., featuring, on several occasions, the works of his father, creating an imaginary dialogue. This synthesis shows a surprising convergence of the work of both authors (and, for some time, also collaborators), whose approach significantly differed at first sight. While Jan Rajlich Sr.'s work was almost exclusively dominated by landscape painting and then abstraction, his son's work has always been characterized by figurative works, stylized in diverse ways.
Vít Jakubíček
