http://www.ogv.cz/source_exhib

 Curator: Jiří Zemánek

Painting by Jan Pražan went through a remarkable development during the last five years, in which the artists' search for a personal painterly language joined the psychical process of disclosing his own deep identity. Desire for beauty inseparably penetrated the spiritual desire for unity, integration with the whole. The show in which Jan Pražan decided to exhibit together with his friend, action artist Dominik Strouhal, documents his work from 2015, which mirrors the intensive process of personal and creative transformation. Its symbolic title - "Source" - relates to that.

The period from 2012 when Pražan finished his studies of painting at FaVU in Brno till 2015 was for his inner life a period of complex, dramatic search. Language of early paintings oscillates between freely conceived structural abstraction and more narrative symbolic painting of archetypal landscapes. It shows Jan's pursuit for articulation of a higher universal order, perceived aesthetically but more and more also on the level of content, meaning the symbolization of the transpersonal aspect of consciousness, with various links to buddhism or animism. These „images of the landscape of spirit“ bear evidence of Jan's psychical transformation; we read in them characteristic features of initiation or psychospiritual crisis – motives of solitude, desolation, disintegration of structures and loss of identity, journey into unknown and confrontation with the sensed secret.

Jan's deep desire for self-examination and experience of wholeness conducted him – via the praxis of meditation in which he was inspired mostly by buddhism and teaching of atma vichara Ramana Maharishi – gradually in 2015 to the experiences of expanded states of consciousness, evoked by the sacred visionary plant ayahuaska. The bravery to follow the journey of interspection and to connect his painterly work with it was strenghtened by the example of his teacher, painter Martin Mainer, and especially by painter Otto Placht, who revived his life and work in connection with the rain forest Amazonian culture of South American tribe Shipibo, where the tradition of ritual use of ayahuaska is still alive.

Dramatically treated paintings are authentic testimony of author's personal transformation. It shows itself in the motives of heroic struggle, consuming fire with dominating red, unleashing of ropes, respective death and rebirth. Those images are opening a new vision of living, with magical universe vibrating with bright colours and energy, in which the individual self opens and unifies with a larger landscape of consciousness. It enabled Jan to fully develop the processual method of work, and his paintings seem almost as personifications of energetic entities, as spontaneously originated living painterly organisms. Spontaneously developing painterly gesture and the whole, full visuality of those images emerge from bodily experiences and reflect the inseparability of visual vision and deep psychic experiences. Jan himself says that painting for him is above all process, pleasure and spiritual experience, in which the moment of flow effect is important, when he fully emerges in the process of creation and disappears in it.

Each of us is connected with the original source of cosmic evolution, from the immense creativity of which we were born and are being born. Paintings by Jan Pražan present not only the outstanding contribution to contemporary Czech painting, in which it stands side by side with the similarly visionary conceived work by Otto Placht, Martin Mainer or Karel Malich. They are also important because they open this new and very hopefull cosmological perspective. They bring a message of our reconnection with nature and cosmos which is highly important for us and for further continuation of human civilisation on this beautifully living planet.

Regional Gallery of Vysočina in Jihlava - Komenského 10