Jan Vlček (born 1940, Slavíkovice)
Jan Vlček belongs to the generation of painters who went through prof. Karel Souček’s figural school and monumental painting school. Since he finished his studies, he regularly exhibits, not very often though. The core of his work is not the themes, but the way of creation. Jan thematically focuses on Karel Souček’s Don Quixotes, pictures with Vietnamese theme within era assignment, themes of personal interest, biblical themes, but also on serious figural battles, persecution, or civil expressions from ateliers. Formally, it is usually a dashing drawing, which explores a theme of human scrums in a very detailed way to offer a base for painting creation that has been leading to pure abstraction in recent years.

The White Room usually introduces works by artists of young and middle-age generation, as the curatorial purpose of the space is to run on a booking system for residents of Pragovka – Jan Vlček’s atelier has been there for the last five years. The core of his work, or at least the work he considers as his own, is the dashing drawing he has been focusing on since he was at the Technical Institute of Glass Studies in Železný Brod, and then also at the Academy of Fine Art (V. Tittlebach and K. Souček ateliers). The atelier of K. Souček taught him the art of virtuosity, monumental form, and simplification of the message. So, each of his picture’s topic is firstly explored by drawing, in detail. The White Room exhibition introduces Jan’s series of smaller and larger-format paintings, displaying the width of painting close-ups, peaking with abstract theme. Despite the variety of topics, the works seem compact for their expressions that vary from simple sketches to final pictures, rooted between the actual depiction and the expressiveness of the painter’s message. Such classical attitude enables Jan to reveal the hidden face of things, when only the painter’s invention makes it possible for shapes in space, brightness and shadow and light and darkness to be layout. Especially while creating figural pictures, Jan refers to baroque paintings, however, he adds civil features and reduces painting figural forms that are often used in late cubist figures. His recent years’ interest in abstraction is logically reasoned by introducing the process of creation: instead of groups haunted across a colourful field, we observe a dialogue of colours, and big or small patterns and surfaces in the picture – do not worry about the message.