Writing about Petr Písařík’s work and about the artist himself isn’t an easy task for me. The reasons for this aren’t what you think.
Maybe you’re saying to yourself, “He doesn’t know Pisi really, his paintings don’t interest him and why pay any attention to this painter anyway? There’s hundreds upon hundreds of them. And anyway, he doesn’t even know how to paint roses with a sunset. Or is it not so?”
When I came to the MXM Gallery on the 30th of August in 1995, I really didn’t know Pisi at all. I didn’t know the young bearded guy sitting on a couch in the office studying me through dark glasses was the artist whose exhibition I’d come to see. I had no idea that his saying “Don’t get mad sir, but you should really dress better” could have been meant seriously. And it didn’t occur to me that Armani doesn’t have to be an Italian football player and Kenzo isn’t necessarily the name of a thong. It was precisely these names and brands that were featured in all of the paintings being exhibited, as well as in the catalogue. In short, Pisi was right: I should have known Boss and Calvin Klein.
After that I installed Pisi among friends. And before he moved to Prague, I visited him a few times in České Budějovice. These visits were truly worth it.
Imagine that you’re walking along on the street and you meet someone you know. Nothing extraordinary, that’s for sure. But if on the same street you meet fifteen or twenty people you know, it’s not so ordinary any more. And imagine that beyond that street there’s another with fifteen, twenty more smiles coming at you. Then more and more, more shoutouts of “Hey Pisi!” And once you finally get to the square you’re seeing spots from all those greetings. How many people does Pisi know? And how many of them are his friends? It would seem that all of České Budějovice exists just to hide dozens of smiles and handshakes, all for Pisi.
And Pisi in Prague? That’s just magic that’s fully enchanting. It’s because Pisi is a person who knows how to enjoy himself. That is if he has the means for it at the time. I remember once before I got my paycheck we were counting change to see if we had enough for two beers. Then Pisi sold a painting and we had it made. As I was leaving his studio he just snapped his fingers and called his personal taxi driver. A white Mercedes and a chauffeur in gloves and a suit showed up and off I went, with Pisi paying for everything. Where did I go? Wherever I wanted...maybe to Mars. It was simply grand and top notch stuff. At bars he was even more generous. But that was just the week he sold a painting, then came another week and it was all over. The money ran out and we went back to what we had before: “Listen, do we even have enough for two beers?”
Pisi is mainly a painter, a visual artist and a wonderful one at that. He was a member of the art group Pondělí (Monday) and one of the most original creators of plastics arts and installations that I’ve ever met. The way he organizes his exhibitions and transforms them basically into a kind of Gesammtkunstwerk is pretty unique for our scene. His connection of paintings and plastics in an entirely composed installation in a creative space or gallery and how he understands the whole and details is the alpha and omega. Go through the exhibition and see for yourself.
For me, Pisi is, above all, a painter. A painter whose paintings I’ve been collecting for years, paintings I love. I love them all, from those Calvin Kleins and Bosses which, with their muted colours and certain sobriety of expression fall into the current trend of Czech abstraction, all the way through the lightened stylizations of bottles and mirrors to the completely abstract full surface compositions. Yet the expressive palette that Pisi brilliantly commands is in no way coming to an end.
When I started writing this chatter, I only knew the framework of the concept of this exhibition and really nothing about which paintings and plastics would be exhibited. This is due to the simple reason that they hadn’t been created yet. Last October Pisi had an important exhibition in the 1st Floor Gallery and so he had to create the paintings and some of the sculptures for the Václav Špály Gallery. The exhibition’s concept wasn’t all too clear either. If I exaggerate a little bit then one of the extreme solutions we had were to demolish the building where the Václav Špály Gallery is located and build a new one in which all of the floors were part of the gallery. Does this sound crazy to you? For me, not really all that much.
So why isn’t it easy for me to write about Pisi? Probably because I know him all too well and I like his paintings and plastics. And when you like something, you can very easily slip into a non-critical celebration of both the work and their author. Even if, in the case of Pisi, it’s a celebration that, in its own way, is true.
Richard Adam (8. 11. 2013)
Who Here is Taking this Seriously... | Exhibition | Václav Špály Gallery (galerievaclavaspaly.cz)
