Petr Písařík’s Prague studio, wherever it may be, is often the center of social interest. After all, the artist’s latest works reflect the social design movement and react to the changing visuality of global civilization. Písařík’s work extends to the reserves of abstraction saturated with impulses from the world of classic modern art, pop culture, the fashion industry, and the world of brand names and various current and updated fashion waves. Although he creates compositions whose basis one would assume come out of geometrical tendencies, the artist disrupts these tendencies in every which way, searching for visuality’s maximum possibilities. Along with paint, the artist also uses other materials. His works are created through layering, both in the semantic and literal sense.
The second line of Písařík’s work comes out of his experience with plastics art. After all, he is an academically trained sculptor coming out of renowned, artistic and therefore different “brands” of the 60’s represented by such names as Kolíbal and Veselý. He therefore also creates spatial artefacts which do not, however, deny the painterly approach. On the contrary, his painting is also spatially inflicted. As a result, Písařík’s exhibitions tend to be composed of architectonic-painterly installations. Nevertheless, this was not always the case. After all, the artist’s entry into the art world in the 90’s took place in the form of plastics or objects, although always connected to a social reality. That sociality, that is the connection to the surrounding visual world, has stayed with the artist along with his transition to painting. In turn, painting later came to dominate his works to become his current main artistic visual output. However, Písařík is not naturally only interested in the aesthetic level of pictorial communication. His works have at least two levels, perhaps even dissonant, where in addition to a certain beauty of contemporary visual inputs, the artist also deals with their meaning or a certain degree of criticism. It is not for nothing that Písařík’s exhibition in the Black Swan gallery has been named after a comment that the artist has borrowed from the painter Vladimír Skrepl: If you want to be original, it’s enough just not to lie.
Martin Dostál
