October 2005
The Reason, Saturday, Production – the titles of the individual thirds of the exhibition project in etc. gallery tend to a slightly misleading collocation. With great intensity, Luděk Rathouský and Marek Meduna divided one exhibition term into three intermezzos. For maximum effect, they augmented the programme with entertaining music performances. The quintessentiality of the whole event was supported by slices of bread with lard and onion and barrels of beer. Who would claim that this is not art? The authors are absolutely serious: great art and small pleasures.
Production. Another of Rathouský’s fittingly self-reflexive exhibition titles. The hundreds of drawings exhibited express the author’s view of contemporary artistic production: his belief that most contemporary artists create unsystematically and do not use the paths of chance and error to cultivate their artistic perception. Rathouský's principle is the permanence of creation.
The success of painting today depends on a well-chosen theme and its presentation. Rathouský violates this limitation on principle with his own approach to creation: drawing as the means and process of thinking. He is both consistent and spontaneous in his compulsive need to record daily his own mental state as well as that of society. Rathouský’s drawings contain subconscious, intimate and fabulating motifs along with fleeting glimpses from the streets, media or other stories. The ambiguous interpretation, and the content and composition’s withdrawal of expression in the final artefact, removes Rathouský’s paintings from the sphere of illustration or comics - although at certain moments it circles closely around these spheres in its narration, and the rhythm and shortcut techniques of comics.
The almost frenetic production is also linked to the artist’s aversion to the sterile visuality of a work of art. He detests aestheticisation, but at the same time realises its inevitability, and searches for tolerable boundaries. With a relatively naïve honesty, he reveals himself in the moments of burning passion for a “plot” as well as in the moments of emptiness including the helpless feelings of “I don’t know” that symbolise the safety nets, the molecular structures in the background and the repeating elements of black holes or cumuli, plants and bordures which are insinuated rather than literal. It is mostly in the large formats that these drawing attributes become kind of subconscious leitmotifs. A further external defence against excessive aestheticisation is Rathouský’s intentional use of “non-artistic” means, the limits of which the author surpasses with pleasure – such as smooth surfaces of paper, and markers…. It is significant that Rathouský. refuses to work with photographic patterns and relies exclusively on his own imagination. In Production, the author presents absolutely everything, without censorship.
Edith Jeřábková, 2005
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