Klenová Grannary
4. 9. - 30. 10. 2011

“The most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith

in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Picture must be

miraculous: the instant one is completed, the intimacy between the creation

and the creator is ended. He is an outsider. The picture must be for him, as for anyone experiencing it later, a revelation, an unexpected and unprecedented resolution of an eternally familiar need.“

Mark Rothko (1903-1970), “The Romantics were Prompted…“, Possibilities, I. New York, 1947, p. 84

From the very beginning of his career, Patrik Hábl has approached the picture as a place where just such a miracle can take place. His work represents the intersection of a complex spectrum of outward and inward phenomena that gradually emerge and then submerge once more. A key feature here is the ever-changing character of Hábl’s painting style, motifs and degree of abstraction. Hidden behind all these incarnations of expression is the continual and unifying source of the artist’s vision based on the notion of pictorial space as the “projection screen“ of contemplative imagination. With Hábl, changeability is a principle that keeps enabling fresh explorations and discoveries. This means that he never becomes detached from the fundamental contact between the fabric of his mind and the fabric of the picture. Through his ever-changing  painting, Hábl also resolutely protects his freedom-in other words the imaginary soil in which the fragile seeds of poetical thought germinate best. In his work we can also trace the elasticity of temporal linearity, not simply in his returns that bring to life his earlier thematic focal points but also in how he creates in his pictures a kind of captivating “time beyond time“. With Hábl we continually stand on the shifting threshold between different, even opposite principles that, for all the tension of their mutual “otherness“, ultimately merge into an active and inseparable whole. Hábl’s carefully guided collisions and fusions-as the basis of the human life and processes of nature-are perhaps what continues to deeply absorb us about his paintings.

Richard Drury

Photos and video