Jakub Špaňhel: From the sacred to the profane

PraguePost: Špaňhel's paintings range from the cathedral to the barnyard

In these pages nine years ago, a review of the painter Jakub Špaňhel's first big solo show in Prague concluded by calling him a highly gifted young artist - a talent to watch. He was fresh out of the art academy at the time, and his show at the City Gallery Prague's Old Town Hall space presented his graduation project, a magnificent set of large-scale church interiors. The show was titled simply "26," to emphasize his precocious artistic achievement.

It has been gratifying to follow this artist's development over the past decade, and now the same institution that gave him that important solo show at 26 is surveying his still-young career at its larger and more prestigious exhibition space in the Municipal Library. (The gallery has been divided for the summer to hold two parallel but independent exhibitions; the other one, by Lubomír Typlt, will be reviewed in a forthcoming issue.)

Špaňhel's "Hens in Hell" begins with a selection of the work that established his reputation, inspired by reproductions of paintings by Oldřich Blažíček (1887-1953), who specialized in church interiors. At the other end of the spectrum, both chronologically and thematically, are his newest paintings, of barnyard animals, which were also inspired by works of the Czech artist Bohuslav Reynek (1892-1971). In between, his themes range from urban landmarks to national banks, from nudes to chandeliers.

As Špaňhel's dramatic early paintings of sacral architecture and meditations on mortality (crematoria and graves) gave way to more earthly themes such as service station nocturnes - a series that has yielded some of his most beautiful work - the underlying substance has remained constant: the dematerialization of spatial forms to get at the kernel of his subject, and a love of light. He has also shown an ongoing interest in the relationship of a contemporary creator to the art and monuments of the past.

Combining bravura gestural brushwork with a sense for monumentality, Špaňhel delivers a distilled essence of his subject, adding a minimum of details with unerring strokes. The best ones pulsate with a sense of immediacy for the viewer and convey the impassioned physicality of their creation.

The age-old problem of how to express light with pigment has been one of Špaňhel's formal preoccupations since his student days, as evidenced by his earliest piece in the show: a studio interior bathed in a warm rosy glow. He moved on to recreating the hazy light that streams through cathedral windows with thin washes of white and gray. In one phase, Špaňhel turned up the drama considerably with bucketsful of gold paint, which he has since turned down to a more subtle accent - to great effect. He has continued in his exploration of light in sublime nocturnes of service stations and rainy streets, and also in a series of chandeliers.

Špaňhel initially painted chandeliers as props in a series of nude paintings, but they eventually became an independent theme. While the nudes are perhaps his least compelling paintings in the show, uncharacteristically flat and static, the chandeliers literally and figuratively shine, sometimes seeming like a statue column surrounded by a blaze of votive candles.

The show takes a somber turn with two paintings of national central banks (Macedonia's and Brazil's, from a larger series). Painted in 2008 and 2009, they strike an appropriate chord of austerity and decline, in tune with the world financial crisis that began at that time. They are his most abstract works in the show and contain the least amount of light.

His newest works, the previously mentioned barnyard animals inspired by Reynek (who had a retrospective at the City Gallery last year), have an atypical two-dimensionality, at times mimicking the surface effects of prints. The title subjects - Goat in a Field or Two Turkeys and a Donkey, for example - recall animals from cave paintings; they seem to dissolve into the flat abstract brushwork and then emerge from it, as if from a fog.

A barnyard motif also appears near the beginning of the show, in a small room that the artist stenciled floor to ceiling with chickens using a specially made paint roller - a technique he began experimenting with as a student. In Hens in Hell, from which the show takes its title, the viewer is enveloped in an inferno of black chickens backlit by an aurora of blazing red.

The paint-roller technique appears elsewhere, in uneven rows of crosses, giving a sense of driving past a steady stream of grave markers through day and night. The overall feeling, while somber, is ultimately of the predominance of light over dark.

The continuous thread running through Špaňhel's work is a masterful sense of space, whether he is painting cathedrals or fuel pumps, and his talents shine brightest when he lets himself get swept away in the various qualities of light. The City Gallery has proved once again that its curators are keen at spotting promising young artists and continuing to support them as they mature. It should be exciting to watch Špaňhel's continued evolution.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers