Petr Tejkal - “Growth”

Petr Tejkal’s artistic method is characteristic of outlining the limits of his research beforehand, while the research is demarcated by the exclusive interest in painting. If the artist employs synthetic colors and sprays, it is not due to his craving for experiments; the aim here is to draw as close as possible to the represented reality or, on the contrary, to create a space (an artificial landscape) which would be as raw as possible via using these materials. In his earlier painting cycle featuring falling shelves, we can indeed see real, normalized enamel spilling from the cans. The space and the cans, however, still retain the images in their illusive frame. The overturned shelf is captured at the very moment when its falling is inevitable.

The tension in Tejkal’s paintings is caused by the frozen moment. Equally, the landscapes – irreversibly transformed by our civilization – do not in fact represent apocalyptic visions of decay but, rather, a new reality. A prefab building in the paintings is a newly emerged mineral at which the ravage of time gnaws equally as at the surrounding nature. Because, Petr Tejkal is the “Darwinist” who is convinced that the products of humans are parts of the nature, and that they grow.
The growth in the sense of constant – albeit maybe seemingly reversed – development is present in all Tejkal’s paintings. Take, for example, his plates “decorated” with motifs of convalescent homes, hotels and factories instead of folk motifs, which clearly refers to the above-mentioned proposition. In more distant times, the plate would probably be decorated with an image of a stork, in more recent period, with a stork sitting on a smokestack – and now, simply, with nothing but the smokestack.