The second solo exhibition by renowned Czech painter Jaroslav Valečka entitled Dunkelchronik opens at gallery twenty-six on Saturday, February 15th, 2025. However, this time it’s not exclusively about Valečka’s latest works, but about a fascinating, cross-disciplinary collaboration between three artists. Dunkelchronik is a collaborative work: a previous publication already featured the impressive interplay between Jaroslav Valečka’s painting and Jolana Pastor’s strong Czech short prose – now this concept has been expanded to include the lyrical works of Austrian author Catrin M. Hassa.
For Jaroslav Valečka’s oeuvre, it has always been above all the examination of the captivating, eventful history of the Sudeten German border region, especially the Lusatian Mountains, which is his inspiration and thematic guideline, as he has repeatedly spent time in this somewhat forgotten region from his earliest youth, deeply absorbing its melancholic, almost brooding and painful aesthetic – as it is handed down in folklore.
According to art historian Adam Hnojil, Valečka “programmatically returns to the low forms of culture that were made contemptible with the advent of postmodernism, rehabilitating them”. In this way, he turns not only to certain techniques, but also to specific content, such as 19th century puppetry or tavern songs, the Bänkelsang, which in turn, following this line of tradition, explains his highly dramatic pictorial content, such as accidents, murders or (natural) disasters.
Thus, stylistically, as well as in form and content, Valečkas work is all about a distinctive combination of expressive symbolism and naivist morphology, resulting in the creation of an idiosyncratic visual idiom, characterized by contrasting effects in various shades of blue and yellow – which are often compositionally emphasized by the existence of a high view point and, associated therewith, exceptional distance and vastness – rendering countless variations of the pictorial elements nature, architecture and the human figure, accentuated by the depiction of twilight (dusk, dawn and night versus moonlight, as well as snow, respectively water, versus blazing fire) conduces to the artistic exploration of the imminence of death and fate.
The Dark Chronicle depicts events from the most diverse historical epochs that have shaped this region, from the passage of the Swedish troops, the end of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the first moments of the republic, the horrors of Nazism and the Soviet occupation to the present day, in the grotesque form characteristic of Jaroslav Valečka and his pictorial idiom: flashing, even blazing, grotesqueness, the will-o’-the-wisp of a bizarre playfulness, pseudo-naïve morbidity and definitely a good dose of black humor – as they are undoubtedly also not foreign to folklore in the form of fables, legends or tales and song lyrics – also permeate the texts of the two authors Pastor and Hassa. Both of them confront the inscrutability of the subject matter with linguistic artistry and defies it with an unconventional and powerful vitality and contradiction.
Sacred iconography in particular, but of course also its secular counterpart, have for centuries, even millennia, demonstrated the cultural-historical proximity, if not interwovenness, of the media of image and writing, or rather that of image and language. The history of art and literature is full of noble, high-caliber collaborations in terms of illustration, but also “free adaptations“ in poetry: none other than André Breton wrote poems based on Joan Miró’s 23 “constelaciones” (1939-41). Miró, who wrote picture poems himself from 1924 onwards, offers us the antithesis of Edward Hopper’s work, who was clearly of the opinion: “If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” It is clear that the art historical telos does not prove Hopper right here, quasi automatically, as would be the case in the natural sciences, for example: If he believes that, in case everything can be expressed in words (sufficiently or at all!), then painting is hereby deprived of its raison d’être, that is his position, which is contemplated as Hopper is clearly a man of his time, with his own artistic approach, thus a certain unique perspective.
According to Wittgenstein, the limits of our language set the limits of our world; the specific semantic fields, and especially the semantic gaps, of a language impressively demonstrate this to us again and again in everyday life – even and especially in times of translation apps and AI. The collective knowledge, the collective experience of a group of speakers is condensed in linguistic images, idioms, difficult translate to untranslatable gems of their language, which have shaped their everyday cultural life in their speaking consciousness. In Latin America, people inevitably think of a condor when they hear the word “bird”, whereas people socialized in Central Europe immediately see something sparrow-like in their mind’s eye – to give a striking example.
Hence, it is the interaction of two languages, over and above the meeting of two literary genres and two writers, that gives Dunkelchronik its peculiar textual radiance. Two linguistic very distinct melodies, two linguistic histories with their particular myths, connotations and colorations form, so to speak, the soundtrack for Valečka’s unique visual cosmos.
The opening event – which is going to include the book presentation – on the occasion of which Jaroslav Valečka will travel from Prague to Vienna especially to offer you the unique opportunity of a personal guided tour through the exhibition, is intended not only to present the work and personality of the artist, but also to allow our visitors to experience it more directly on a very personal level. Of course, you may also seize this opportunity to have the book signed…
Jolana Pastor is a graduate of the Faculty of Aesthetics at Charles University in Prague (under Prof. Vlastimil Zuska, 2003) and winner of the Václav Hraběte Literary Prize for Poetry (Hořovice, 1996). She studied creative art therapy with Beate Albrich (Chair of the Committee of the Czech Association for Art Therapy), specializing in the Rogers approach. She completed self-awareness and psychoanalytic studies at the Institute of Applied Psychoanalysis with Doc. Jiří Kocourek and training in psychosocial work in Gestalt psychotherapy in Prague. For more than fifteen years, she translated specialized medical texts for a public institution of the state administration. For several years she ran a private art therapy practice.
She is currently an art curator and promoter of the work of the graphic artist and painter Miloš Ševčík and cooperates with institutions such as the South Bohemian Gallery Alš in Hluboká nad Vltavou, the West Bohemian Gallery in Pilsen, the Mánes Exhibition Hall and Karolin.
She is the author of numerous curatorial texts and exhibitions by Jaroslav Valečka, Jaroslav Hořánek, Petr Skala, Vladimír Svoboda, Zuzana Růžičková and the aforementioned Miloš Ševčík. She has prepared several monographs and a book of short stories for publication and has long collaborated with the art historian Adam Hnojil and the painter Jaroslav Valečka. She lives and works in Prague near Petřín and in the picturesque area of Kokořínsko – Mácha region. She is the mother of a young, highly gifted daughter with Asperger’s syndrome and the partner of an internationally successful exhibitor and jury member in the field of philately.
Catrin M. Hassa was born in 1983, lives and works as an author in Vienna. After partial studies in Hispanic Studies, Art History and Psychology, she studied social work.
Readings in Austria and Germany; Member of the Graz Authors’ Assembly (GAV) since 2016; Publications in anthologies (e.g. in: “sfd & pataphysik”, zeitschrift der schule für dichtung wien #5, 20. 11. 2023) and magazines (e.g. in: “Wienzeile”, 40/2003); 2013-2016 Contribution to hydrazine.at (contributions to “Die unfriesiertesten Philosophen aller Zeiten”, “Rekordhitze & Jahrhundertwinter – 2015 in Cartoons & Schlagzeilen”, “Wien wie es wirklich scheint”, “Schwarzbuch Farben” – each published by Holzbaum); Participation in the Ö1 radio series “Nachtbilder” on September 5th 2015; Special prize from the City of Vienna for young authors as part of the competition for the Vienna Workshop Prize 2015. Participation in the radio series “Radio Du Grand Mot” episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the 2nd season; Since 2018: collaboration with glitch musician Wolfwetz – poetry audio book “rendez-vous mit dem realitätsprinzip” (“a date with the principle of reality“); Since 2023: collaboration with live musicians (translation of song lyrics from English, French and Spanish to Viennese). Three poetry volumes have been published published (by the Löcker-Verlag, Vienna) so far: “Jetzt!” (2014), “in der herztaille” (2018) and “dann leben wir eben später” (2021);
Masken
Würgen
Kopf im Wald
Köpfe
Jacht
See
Die Scheune
Burschen am Friedhof
Der Kugelblitz
Marionetten
Masovec
Kobold
Zeit
Glühen
