Jirí Havlíček’s Fantastic Vision 

In Havlícek’s production, whether it be painting, graphic work, multimedia website animation or, more recently digital sound works, one feature persists - a fantastic inventiveness which goes against the expected and which blends surreal incongruity with mystical intensity. The persistent quality to his drawing, with its complex repetitions is echoed in the reiteration of sound-bites or the reoccurrence of themes and fantastic imagery over the decades. Jiří Havlícek started as a surrealist and attained an international position, exhibiting in Yugoslavia with the Czech Surrealist group in the 1960s, in Belgium as part of the C.I.A.F.M.A. Fantasmagie group in the 1960s and 70s, and with the Italian Surrealist group, Surfanta in the 1970s.

The graphic work draws upon many sources - cabbalistic texts, alchemical and mediaeval mystical texts, the visionary drawings of William Blake, Islamic calligraphy, Baroque ceiling paintings, science fiction and graffiti art, to name but a few. What these seemingly disparate elements have in common is a relentless energy, a spiraling, repetitive drive, a hand-drawn quality, a sense of soaring light and vision, or mystical illumination bursting through the clouds of skepticism, anxiety and doubt. In the early work, the bizarre creations of science fiction, half-man, half-machine rejoin the equally strange creations of Bosch, Brueghel, and mediaeval nightmares.

In these early works, creatures and objects were created from within the graphic marks themselves, drawing upon the unconscious mind and the inspiration of the marks themselves as much as on their arcane sources and repertoire of references. Most seem to have a frightening, Kafkaesque aspect and many combine human, animal and mechanical traits, overlaid with Hebrew or Latin script. Sometimes, as with Klee’s inventions, the characters which Havlícek creates seem to take on a life of their own on the page, like the Golem which stirs from base matter into organic life, or like the alchemy which would attempt to create living breath from inert substance and turn base metals into gold.

For Havlícek, the artist/scholar is also a kind of alchemist, concocting new amalgams from the raw materials of the cultural world, raking over cultural heritage, from Central Europe with its troubled and shifting borders, from ancient civilizations with their graphic and scriptural traditions, to eke out what has been forgotten, mislaid or lost in the damaging process which is History. “Czech space” as the Czechs themselves are wont to call their territory, occupies more than physical space. It is simultaneously linguistic space, cultural heritage, memory and tradition. It is a space which has been invaded, overrun, annexed, ruled from afar and isolated and alienated from itself during the last century alone.

It has been a very difficult space to make art in, and especially an art which is non-conformist, experimental, and which attempts to find a lost unity underlying languages and cultures, and yet for a small and fiercely independent country it is rich in culture, aphorisms, metaphors and above all humor, albeit sometimes of a dark complexion. During the Communist Period, official artists grouped themselves into a Union, thereby not only protecting themselves and ensuring patronage, but also disenfranchising all those who were not able to claim ‘professional status’ by having graduated from the Academy of Art or the Academy of Design in Prague. For Havlícek, as for many of his generation, this was a difficult time. Experimental and non-conformist art went underground, limiting itself to whatever media or materials as were available, publishing its outputs via photocopied or hand-written records, and presenting itself to audiences, often of a few friends in someone’s front room, or the upstairs room in a bar. Because professional status was resultant from being granted membership of the artist’s union, exclusion from this category meant that artists had to find another occupation, since employment was compulsory.

The international recognition which Havlícek had already begun to gain following his graduation from the Masaryk University Brno, evaporated or at least was curtailed, and instead he devoted himself to his teaching, participating in many cultural