P e t r    K u n č í k

   Petr Kunčík was born on 29 June 1981 in Přerov, in 2000-2003 he graduated from the Zlín Private Higher Vocational School of Art and then from the Faculty of Education of the Brno University of Technology (2003-2008). Since 2006 he has been studying in the painting studio of Petr Kvíčala at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology. He is therefore one of the youngest, but also one of the most prominent and more or less established representatives of the emerging artistic generation on the Czech art scene. Petr Kunčík's distinctive artistic expression was already formed at the Zlín School of Art, in the spiritual closeness or affinity of the artist with one of its inspiring teachers, the painter and poet Pavel Preisner. His artistic vision of the world, the artistic form inherent in his creative mentality, is already fully asserted in his painting cycle Abiogenesis (2003). Spontaneity on the basis of poetic visuality is characteristic of all his other work.

 After his consistently figurative beginnings, his painting, starting with Abiogenesis, is also completely free in the thematic sphere; it benefits from visual impressions and spiritual experiences. It is a fanciful transformation of the natural world into a purely aesthetic reality. A special role is played by coincidences, some kind of post-surreal encounters, various anomalies of unexpected connections in human existence, but also the perception of errors and defects in the world of things.  The randomly revealed, various -possible and existing- phenomenal incongruities or atomization of an internally unified existence seem to provoke the artist to an integrative, dynamic painterly fabrication of the subject, which often opens itself up to technical experimentation - never, however, at the expense of his characteristic bravura painting. This is the case, for example, in the pictorial series The Sound of Tibetan Bowls all the way in Japan (2006), which is based on black and white photographs from an old travelogue of Japan, or in the case of the monochrome grey and white series of pictorial compositions Phosphenes. The cycle of figurative paintings Joys, Duels, whose expression is reflected in the execution on a rough ground, is in turn a manifestation of an almost "Rubenesque" exuberance in shape exaggeration, but also in colour excess.

     The most recent pictorial compositions, which the artist presents in Cabinet T under the title Labyrinths, are in some respects a continuation of the paintings of the previous cycle in their painterly spontaneity, but their real roots lie in the pictorial compositions he created at the painting symposium in Milotice (2006), which, as he himself states in his diploma thesis at the Faculty of Education, began his "transition into a fascinating period of fascination with ornament". One can only add that Petr Kunčík's permanent departure from any rational aspects of painting towards pure intuition culminates in these "ornamental compositions" - a purely painterly concept, painting as a means of revealing values embedded in the depth of the instinctive sphere of the human being.

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