The exhibition of the Czech artist Miloš Cvach (1945) and the French artist Sophie Curtil (1949) aims to outline their creative development from their student years to the present. In a chronological line and in a mutual confrontation, it reveals the specifics, intersections and differences of the respective artists whose private and professional paths crossed each other half a century ago. Their creative personalities crystallised in the climate of a free society, in France, where Miloš Cvach immigrated to escape the Czechoslovak ‘normalisation’ totalitarianism in the mid-1970s and joined his wife, Sophie. Both of them were thus able to naturally assimilate the contemporary tendencies of world art, such as minimalism or the Arte Povera movement, and formulate their authentic artistic expression against their background. Even though they expressed themselves in the language of geometric abstraction, their work always remained firmly anchored in the tangible world – especially the landscape and urban architecture. Their creative processes derive from careful observation of natural and cultural phenomena, through the exploration of their internal laws, to their final translation into eloquent artistic compression.

The concept of the exhibition at the Museum Kampa was inspired by the remarkable book L’art par quatre chemins (To Art by Four Ways), in which Miloš Cvach and Sophie Curtil offered a unique opportunity to interpret works from the history of art. Their playful interpretation based on the ‘poetics of the four elements’, as defined by the French philosopher and aesthetician Gaston Bachelard, can be applied to their own work. 

The register and colouring of Miloš Cvach’s works show affinity with the aesthetics attributed to the Far East. The precisely constructed shapes of his reliefs possess the lightness and elegance of Buddhist shrines. The cool pastel shades of glossy lacquer on the surface of the curved plywood are only occasionally intersected by a richly coloured accent. The poetic qualities of the elements of water and air with their inherent dynamics of rise and fall, gush and flow, assert themselves here.

In contrast, the heat of the Arabian Desert radiates from Sophie Curtil’s graphic pages and especially from her pastel drawings, where the curves of sand dunes and the silhouettes of Islamic buildings loom against the darkened sky. In their outlines, as well as in the rich valences of ochre, cadmium red and ultramarine, the elements of earth and fire manifest themselves. Illumination, dimming, brightening, flaring and other luminous events on the surface of the paper unleash a dramatic play of light and shadow, modelling the volumes of bodies in cosmic dimensions.

The joint exhibition of Sophie Curtil and Miloš Cvach offers the viewer an extraordinary experience of the interplay of two sensitive observers who are able to discover beauty in the mundane and translate these rare discoveries into a metaphoric artistic form in which sensory perceptions are combined with poetic content.