It is not difficult to imagine moving from one point to another, from point A to point B. Indeed, the number of points in the universe far exceeds the number of letters in the alphabet, in any alphabet, whether we see them or only assume they are there. How much movement takes place without us being aware of it, without us being able to keep track? What exactly falls within the set of all movements? People move across cities, regions, and continents. They criss-cross the planet. Stars and planets orbit vast galaxies. Molecules vibrate within matter. We study the regularity and deviation of movement between and around points, describing ellipses and ecliptics, the fluctuations of Brownian motion. In order to comprehend all these changes, we create schemata and diagrammes, systems of rules. The world consists in one big constant process of change, one enormous constant movement.
Our ideas about the future have been shaped by modernity and its various utopian schemes. We go back to the crossroads to gaze upon the systems and hypotheses of the past. Among its expansions and centrifugal forces we search for a centre. Vladimír Houdek’s work revolves around the artificialism of Štyrský and Toyen, the black paintings of Suprematism, Kandinsky’s alchemy and reflections on the spiritual in art. Houdek consistently draws on such materials as books and maps – the guides that lead us through an unknown world.
Houdek’s process goes through many stages as he work and reworks layers of acrylic paint, adding, drying, cutting, removing. Alongside these paintings, he also works in gouache and collage. To the glowing alabaster and black expanses of his earlier canvases come the colours of the spectrum, particularly yellow. The titles of his series and exhibitions convey the energy of words: Frisson, Sleeplessness, Round and Round in Silence, Melancholy, The Trickling Expanse. His ever-present geometry evokes the language of science and abstraction. It is also reminiscent of Saturn’s rings, the three-ring conception of giftedness, as conveyed by Dürer’s Melencolia: imagination, sound reasoning, and spiritual intuition. Through his concentric circles, stirring the active mind, the painter evokes the pulsating intensity of a migraine. Houdek’s artistic expression can be characterized by the mutual movements of illusion, parable, geometry, collage, matter, concept, knowledge…
Vladimír Houdek (1984) was born in Nové Město, Moravia. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the painting studio of Vladimír Skrepl. He worked in the visiting instructor studio with Jan Merta and German artist Silke Otto-Knapp. He has won a critic’s prize for young painters (2010) and Jindřich Chalupecký Prize (2012). Over the past two decades, his work, at once geometric and expressive, has been an important part of the contemporary Central European painting scene.
Martina Vítková