The latest publication, which is now available to buy from the Telegraph's reception or e-shop, is a monograph of painter Zbyněk Sedlecky, published to coincide with the exhibition Inscenation, on show at the Telegraph Gallery until 11 May. Curated by Petr Vaňous, the exhibition and also edited by the book's editor, in several chapters he outlines the artist's journey as a painter to date, as well as the development of the artist himself, as the last few years, marked by the Covid pandemic in particular, have led to fundamental changes in his approach to his work.
The introductory chapter Circulating Reality - Memory Fictions outlines the development of Zbyněk Sedlecky's work from the earliest, which forms both the starting point and the counterpoint to the new work. Petr Vaňous mentions here a series of birds on a dark background, when Sedlecký worked mainly with illusory abstraction from the seen, in an attempt to link space with the surface. Another series of paintings were illuminated landscapes with an emphasis on the immediacy and looseness of colour patches. In this case, the content is determined by the form, which suits the landscape well, in which the figures are set, but on which the emphasis is not placed. In addition to the predominant white colour, Sedlecky used unusual angles of view of the casual observer. Zbyněk Sedlecky's latest work is based on the observation of visual communication as it changes and shifts in today's fast-paced society and in a world that offers so much information that one can hardly remain clear in opinion. Sedlecký therefore does not try to find a new universal language, but only reflects on the possibilities of new messages through the medium of painting. The artist brings his spirit into the installations of the exhibitions in which he is intensively involved. He communicates with the given space and thoughtfully chooses images that then communicate with each other. The same was the case in the preparation of the exhibition Staging at the Telegraph, when he and the curator worked together on the entire concept. In this chapter, Petr Vaňous moves on to the very latest series of paintings entitled Tourist. In it, Sedlecký puts the observer in the position of a traveller by depicting public spaces associated with transportation. While these are specific places, the artist uses them to create general prototypes of peripheral, transit places. Sedlecký also makes use of the possibilities of photography, which, although it is a model, is often interpreted quite differently.
In addition to Petr Vaňous, curator Lorenzo Fusi contributed a chapter to the publication entitled The Inexplicable Impression of Visual Split. Here he pauses on the technique and manner of Zbyněk Sedlecky's painting. He mentions that despite the use of acrylic on large canvases, Sedlecky is able to create a set of ephemeral immediate thoughts - events suspended in time - through a kind of thought impressionism. The paintings themselves create a contrast between the harshness of the scenery and the subtlety of the colours used, and also between the disillusionment and regret that the individual feels when coming into contact with the world. Often, in the end, a sense of alienation and unease prevails.
In the next part of Illusion & Interpretation, Petr Vaňous returns again and brings even more of the thought content of Sedlecky's works. An essential moment was the beginning of work with time and memory, movement in space. In this way, Sedlecký refers to moments captured with a camera. These are often of a non-representative character, but in the painting they are given new life. They evoke a real insight into the world - changing, imperfect, seen only for a moment. The artist's innovation then lies in the effort to build a sufficiently solid pictorial space, while avoiding being too descriptive. Zbyněk Sedlecký subjects familiar objects to a process of alienation, everything close appears distant, and the distant close again, a fleeting moment becomes the past. The world created by Sedlecký draws the viewer into a strange interpretive loop, where he loses himself in an illusion, trying to bring a clearer visual sense to the image -to find something familiar - only to have the image shatter again into many contrasting forms in this attempt at interpretation, leaving the viewer further floundering without any claim to a solution.
The next chapter is already devoted directly to the exhibition Inscenation, where many of the aforementioned techniques were applied by the painter. Here Vaňous emphasises especially the transformation over the last few years, when we have all been forced to remain in isolation under the influence of the covid pandemic, which was one of the reasons for the change in the visual character of Sedlecky's works. He is moving away from his remote, alienated landscapes and open exteriors to an enclosed, interior environment. He closes himself in his studio, working with self-portraiture and artificially created reality. He attempts to capture something close to us, something that seems almost at our fingertips. It thus becomes a frequent motif in his current works as a symbol of knowledge through the sense of touch. He sets this intimate proximity in a mysterious timelessness by means of masks, props and mystification. A world staged in this way can easily be questioned and thus remains elusive.
The last part of the publication is an interview with Zbyněk Sedlecky with the engaging title But what I'm most interested in anyway is what happens when I'm no longer in full control of things..., conducted by Lucia Rossi. Here you can find out directly from the artist himself how he perceives the dimension of time in his work, what are the contemplative aspects of his work, what is most important to him in the process of creation, how he works with the model, still life or the scenic terrain in the form of the studio, but also what influence his encounter with the prominent painters Jiří Načeradský and Jiří Sopko had on his work.
The book is interspersed with an extensive pictorial appendix of not only works from the Staging exhibition, but also a cross-section of older works. This makes it possible to get a clear but elusive idea of the visual transformation that Zbyněk Sedlecky's works have undergone over the years.
