LITERATURE
František Skála, ARBOR VITAE SOCIETAS, 2004, pictorial appendix.
František Skála uses here his own personal authorial methods and materials and is interested mainly in their associative possibilities. Skála likes to test analogies between partially random forms and visible and precisely categorizable phenomena. He lets chance, nature, and the viewer's imagination and interpretive abilities create. The work is conceived as a letter from a butterfly to an indeterminate addressee - the butterfly sends the best it has, its own wing, which at the same time contains an observing and perhaps reproaching eye. Skál's entire art object seems to be an inseparable combination of a letter, an eye and a wing, which begin to intertwine together in content.
Letters as an essential theme came into art from several directions, the most frequent being love letters read by their recipients in solitude and seclusion (in various genre paintings), or tragic writings announcing bad news (in moralistic paintings they were often read by weeping mothers on the threshold of the house - i.e. in the place where they received the letter). The letter - wing/eye - by František Skála can accommodate both variants of reading, it can evoke both hope and tragedy. In the history of art, the butterfly wing itself has appeared both in connection with the allegory of the human soul (represented, for example, by the figure of Psyche with butterfly wings) and in reference to fragility, temporality and transience. The letter as a flying wing resembles, for example, the motif of flying kisses that appeared around 1800. Some authors (e.g. Philipp Otto Runge) drew this motif in letters addressed to their loved ones. A letter like an eye can evoke a concern about a kind of surveillance (which is also carried out at a distance) or something like a seductive peacock's eye. The letter - the wing/eye - is thus, surprisingly, also in terms of content, a very complex, layered entity.
František Skála is a leading contemporary artist who has developed a completely unique, unmistakable artistic repertoire of processes, techniques, experiments and means of expression. His work generally combines three key moments: the artist's idea using analogies and associations, the creation of nature and the involvement of the viewer in the interpretive game. In many ways, Skála is pioneering new artistic paths (e.g., including bioart) that are, however, sufficiently accommodating and workable to be followed by wider audiences, as opposed to paths of narrowly conceptual, art-research expressions (which, of course, can address very similar issues).
- Václav Hájek