Zbyněk Sedlecký (1976) is one of the successful graduates of the Studio of Painting I at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where Jiří Sopko and Igor Korpaczewski work. There is no point in discussing which of these painter-teachers is closer to his work, nor which of his classmates his paintings are more similar to. Even by the standards of the most important art college in our country, there are quite a lot of really outstanding personalities of our painting who passed through this studio, and Sedlecký is certainly not lost among them. However, he already has a firm place within the Czech art scene.
Zbyněk Sedlecký is devoted only to painting. In his work, there are no escapes to other media. The most traditional is enough for him to express himself. Even within painting, he does not engage in any boundless experimentation. On the other hand, despite his gradually, one could say even cautiously, evolving and usually very recognizable handwriting, it does not seem that he has fallen into a mannerism or that he is only endlessly rubbing and alienating it. He is not one of those painters for whom a clear handwriting is an important mark and often the culmination of their efforts.
Sedlecký is a very skilled painter. It doesn't matter whether we are looking at paintings in a sketchbook or three-meter canvases, his paintings are accompanied by lightness (as the opposite of tiredness) not as a synonym of ease. The painter's quick shorthand and expression, controlled not only by painter's tape, is complemented by a restrained muted colour palette. On the one hand, the author does not abandon his equal interest in painting as such and the subject on the other. Pure abstraction is practically absent in his work.
The theme of Sedlecky's paintings, in fact his other hallmark, is architecture, at least in recent years. Perhaps a more accurate term would be urban landscape. It is always about existing buildings or entire spaces of large cities. The artist makes no secret of the fact that he uses photographs taken directly by him as a basis.
As far as architecture is concerned, it doesn't really matter where it comes from. In our country, in Europe and basically all over the urbanized world, of course not only in the richer northern hemisphere, there is a huge number of similar buildings, urban complexes, cityscapes and undoubtedly quite a few places with a similarly dehumanized atmosphere. But the theme of the paintings is not globalisation. Although the receding modernity and its masculine universality has unified the character of most cities. Sedlecký goes even further in this unification and successfully strips the places of most of their local contexts, their connections with a region, a country, a continent. It also supports the confusion by not specializing even more specifically on a certain type of building - neither generous skyscrapers nor monotonous prefabricated buildings from Czech housing estates predominate. The author deliberately does not give us easy clues to the location. Everyone can occasionally come across places, corners that, even in an ordinary Western European city, will remind them of the atmosphere of the Palace of Culture in Prague or, for example, a Sofia housing estate. In Zbyněk Sedlecky's paintings we are all as little at home as in the concrete jungles of administrative or commercial centres soon after the last office has closed. Looking at the paintings, we experience déjà vu of walking around foreign cities, especially the parts of them that lie off the tourist radar.
Monolithic buildings made of concrete, their strict geometric grid and the artist's painterly, rather expressive handwriting are symbiotically complementary in the paintings. The artist's need for painterliness is given clear boundaries. In the same way, the paintings themselves are given a solid framework by the presence of architecture. Sedlecky's paintings are not only about architecture. The artist works like an archaeologist of modernity, who uncovers only the dusty, not yet completely obscured layers.
His urban landscapes are accompanied by an ambiguous and often unsettling atmosphere. This is also the case with In Front Of, a series exhibited at the Kabinet T. gallery since the end of last year. The vague plot takes place in front of a somewhat familiar building. It could just as easily be a larger bank as a gallery. We have the opportunity to compare five different perspectives. Some of them seem to differ by mere seconds.
In the foreground we are interested in a figure with a backpack. The shots are probably taken in a hurry and we don't know if we are more interested in the architecture or just the backpack carriers. As the number of views of the same scene increases, our view of the anonymous observer in particular changes. From the ordinary tourist who experiences his holiday at home looking at photos, to the voyeur, to the professional stalker. The monumental formats give the scenes a somewhat oppressive subtext. It's as if it's the eye of an anonymous Big Brother.

The second part of the exhibition, consisting of a free cycle of paintings of sculptures in public space (2011-2012), also remains in the city. Once again, the theme of the archaeology of modernity is played out here, the uncovering of the ultimate success and at the same time the surrender of the artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century. This is not Tatlin's Tower of the Third International, but rather decor in the extreme. As are the geometric patterns convincingly evoking constructivism on mugs and other tableware. If the paintings from this series lack a certain urgency of content of the five In Front Of, we can be all the more carried away here by pure painting. It is in the secondary treatment of the artifacts that cultivate the open spaces near many a concrete monolith that the artist probably comes closest to abstract art.

Martin Fišr