At the Ostrava gallery, Petr Pastrňák is presented with a suggestive mini-retrospective titled The Wind Ripples the Silent Forest. This painter, born on February 17, 1962, in Frýdek-Místek, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague from 1990 to 1996 in the studios of Milan Knížák, Michal Bielický, and Jiří David. Currently, he alternately lives, works, and meditates in Prague and southern India. Since the mid-1990s, Petr has attracted many collectors and curators with his distinctive paintings, which gradually evolved from purely abstract compositions to works addressing specific motifs. In the 1990s, he also worked with video and slide projections. In creating his paintings, he works with a certain degree of chance, while psychophysical concentration and openness to the emerging work are crucial.
The exhibition includes all of Petr's characteristic painting periods, starting with the famous aesthetically refined roller abstractions, sprayed "realistic" portraits, serial works with stamps, up to later landscapes of Czech horizons, calm and burning forests, storms, and industrial black vedutas. The completely contemporary phase of Petr's work is characterized by a certain return to abstract compositions. However, the exhibition is not merely a guide through Petr's footprint in Czech art history, but a unique composition that stimulates with its aesthetic vibrations and contemplative atmosphere. It suggests that painting for Petr is a kind of physical and mental concentration, and the paintings arise as relaxed variations conditioned by the painter’s current state. In many of them, we also distinctly feel a rational echo of art history.
All this is driven by the painter’s desire to move on the edge between the familiar and the other, between tradition and novelty, between tangible reality and its abstraction or abstraction. It is a play between the European concept and East Asian perception, where the premise is that the creator searches at the boundary between similarity and dissimilarity, to recall the words of the famous Chinese ink painter Qi Baishi. A surprise for viewers familiar with Petr’s abstractions or forest silences may be the black-and-white-black stripes of Ostrava’s Nová huť or views of Shanghai.

Martin Dostál

Translated with the help of GPT chat.

Curator: Martin Dostál