HYNEK MARTINEC
WILL AND REPRESENTATION
HOW HIGH THE HIGHEST CANDLE TOM MORTON ON HYNEK MARTINEC
What force governs the universe? According to Arthur Schopenhauer’s great proto-existentialist treatise The World As Will and Representation (1818-19, expanded in 1844 and 1859), every organic and inorganic entity, from rosebushes to crystals, homo sapiens to supernovas, is subject to a blind, insatiable, and ultimately purposeless striving –what the 19th century German Philosopher termed “will”. Not only are we slaves to this force, shackled from cradle to grave to an endless cycle of desire, suffering, momentary satisfaction, restlessness and fresh desire, worse we fail to understand that it is what undergirds – indeed constitutes – reality. Unable to perceive the world independently of how it appears in our own minds, glimpsed through our own particular cognitive goggles, we experience it not as a thing-in-itself, but as a mere collection of discrete phenomena, not as will, but as “representation”.
How to escape this double bind, which for Schopenhauer at least made life barely worth living? One answer he offered was asceticism, another the practicing of compassion for one’s fellow beings. A third was aesthetic experience and artistic production, which the German philosopher believed allowed us to temporarily quiet the din of our desires, and enjoy a state of painless tranquility: “the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing”. The possibility that art might enable us to (as another philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had it) fleetingly “see the world aright” is what attracts the Czech-British painter Hynek Martinec to Schopenhauer’s thought, and goes some distance to explaining why he titled this exhibition of his work “Will and Representation”.
It is worth carefully unpacking what kind of “representation” (in the commonplace sense of the word) is in play in Martinec’s work. Painting, yes, but more particularly a chronologically unstable species of figurative painting which, while its textures and atmospheres recall the canvases of 19th-century Romantic artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Delaroche, has been achieved with the aid of digital photography, and which combines centuriesold motifs (nudes, skulls, sweeping drapery) with pictorial details (plastic toys, deliquescing hillocks of shaving foam) that summon up our own, everyday world. While Martinec’s work displays a consummate technical skill, of a type rarely associated with self-consciously contemporary painting, this facility also operates as a kind of Trojan horse, smuggling in a very 21st-century way of seeing. Conceived and produced during the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, his exhibition
focuses our present, pestilential moment through the lens of (art) history.
In the Spring of 1624, the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck found himself quarantined in Palermo, Sicily, waiting out a plague that would kill over 10,000 of the city’s residents. As the epidemic raged, so did local rumours of spectral visitations to the sick by Saint Rosalia, a 12th-century noblewoman turned hermit, who was said to have withdrawn to a cave on a nearby hill, Mount Pellegrino, in order to dedicate her life to Christ, and who now demanded that her bones be found, and paraded through the ravaged port. A group of Franciscan monks duly began excavating a collapsed cavern on the hillside, found a pile of bones, and carried them in procession through Palermo. Not long afterwards, the epidemic abated, and Rosalia was hailed as the “ santuzza” (or “little saint”) whose divine intervention restored the city to health. Van Dyck, who escaped infection, marked this apparent miracle by painting a number of canvases featuring Rosalia, five of which now survive. In perhaps the best known of these, Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-Stricken of Palermo (1624), she floats high above the port, her eyes to the heavens, her roseate cheeks glowing with health, a crowd of plump-limbed putti tumbling about her skirts as if to promise that, by her grace, bodily proximity will henceforth no longer be a vector for deadly disease.
Rosalia also appears in a number of recent paintings by Martinec, although here she is no idealised flying spectre, but rather a much more grounded, even earthy figure. She is beautiful, certainly, but the artist is unflinching in his HD-sharp, near-photorealistic rendering of the cellulite that dimples her buttocks, the feint moustache on her upper lip, the dark shad ows beneath her eyes. With its grey, concrete floor, the foreground of the space she occupies has the feel of a present-day artist’s studio, and is furnished with nothing more remarkable than a simple wooden stool. She appears either naked, or draped in bolts of red or blue fabric, and is often pictured alongside one or both of a pair of elderly men, whose sagging bodies, variously gaunt and fleshy, underline her youth, and who we might interpret as analogues of the apostles Saint Peter and Saint Paul in Van Dyck’s painting The Coronation of Saint Rosalia (1629). This trio of figures are, in fact, life models, directed, photographed and later painted by Martinec in a series of tableaux that meditate on the unreliability of visual images, and perhaps reality itself. Examine these paintings’ backgrounds, and we see not the artist’s studio wall, but epic natural vistas
(cloud-strafed mountains, bleak icy seas) that recall the landscape works of 19th-century Romantic painters such as John Martin and Caspar David Friedrich. Is there a glitch in this world, or in our perception of it? Where does truth reside, and how might it – if ever – be accessed?
The titles Martinec has given to these canvases point to the long history of human fantasies and anxieties around mimesis and (self-) deception. Pygmalion and Galatea (2019) references Ovid’s 1st century AD narrative poem about a misogynist sculptor who falls in love with an ivory statue he has carved of a “perfect” woman, which is brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite, while Deepfake (2020) stirs thoughts of 21st-century digitally doctored images and videos, and their use in politically motivated misinformation campaigns. Similarly, Don Quixote (2020) borrows its title from Miguel de Cervantes’ 1605-15 novel of the same name (a book that Schopenhauer claimed was one of the five finest works of fiction ever written), whose title character, an ageing Spanish nobleman, becomes so immersed in chivalric literature that he comes to believe he is a medieval knight errant, a delusion that leads him into numerous comic scrapes, including most famously “tilting at windmills” with his lance, imaging that they are ferocious giants.
Wearing a t-shirt and jeans in place of armour, the figure in Martinec’s painting is no knight. Indeed, holding aloft a skull, he resembles less Don Quixote than that other great early 17th century literary protagonist, the title character of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (1603), confronting the remains of the dead fool, Yorick, “a fellow of infinite jest”. Given Martinec’s Schopenhauerian preoccupation with the limits of human perception, we might think here of the Prince of Denmark’s remark to his closest friend “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Does eyeballing a skull –symbolically staring death in the face – give us access to the brutal truth of existence? Maybe, but look at Martinec’s painting closely, and we notice that its subject is blind, and the skull he grasps is in fact a candle, formed from pink wax rather than once-living bone.
At once a gruesome vanitas and a kitsch novelty, an object that speaks simultaneously of the extinguishing of a life and the lighting of a flame, this skull-candle reappears in several other works in the show. In Saint Rosalia (2020), it sits atop a wooden stool, where the thinner of two male figures smears its crown in shaving foam – a recurring motif in Martinec’s work, which we might read as an
index of mutability, of all that seems solid eventually melting into air. Beside the skull-candle sits a green, marbled party balloon. All it would take is a prick and a bang, and this festive adornment – inflated with human breath, with human will – would disappear. To the right of the canvas stands Saint Rosalia, sheathed in red velvet, the curve of her bottom echoing the curve of the balloon. Today, few believe that the “ santuzza” protects humanity against pestilence. Perceptions govern our lives, but they are also subject to slow change, or sudden, explosive destruction. With this in mind, we might contemplate another work in the show, Cancel Culture (2021), in which vapour plumes from an old man’s ear like a blast of cartoon intemperance, or else a departing and irrecoverable thought. Looking at the painting, with its knowingly provocative title, I’m reminded of Hamlet’s observation that “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”.
The centerpiece of Martinec’s exhibition, You Will Bury Me (2021) depicts the artist’s five-year-old daughter Agnes, lying on a grey floor familiar from the paintings of Rosalia and the two elderly men. Wearing a pair of fairy wings, and holding sprays of blue and yellow flowers, she smiles a blissful, unselfconscious smile, her eyes shut to her surroundings, utterly lost in her interior world –what Martinec has described as her ‘fairytale bubble’. Around her are arranged (or rather, she being five, haphazardly strewn) a number of her toys, ranging from an innocuous Minnie Mouse doll and a purple-maned unicorn, to a somewhat more troubling plastic replica of an AK47 assault rifle, and the decapitated head of an action figure which, like the Roman god Janus, who presided over beginnings, endings and transitions, has two faces: one facing forward, one back. We might read these objects, designed by adults to enculture children, as a sign of new, exterior perspectives bearing in on young Agnes, something that’s underscored by the inclusion among them of a pair of kid’s sunglasses. In the far-left corner of the space stands a wooden stool, supporting another pink skull-candle and a blue bowl of mushrooms. Do these speak of nature’s freely-given bounty (foraging for wild fungi is a popular practice in the Czech Republic), or might they also hold out the promise of psychedelic experience, the re-accessing in adulthood of a lost world within?
At first glance, Martinec’s title, which anticipates his own death, appears horribly bleak, but it is in fact a hopeful statement – what parent, after all, would not want to predecease their own child?
Notably, the background of the work does not feature an epic, Romantic landscape, inserted as if through green screen tech, as we saw in the images of Rosalia and the two men, but rather a single flame, emerging from inky blackness. Perhaps Agnes’ inner world is so rich that this is all she requires. In Wallace Stevens’ poem The Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour (1923), he writes: “We say God and the imagination are one… How high the highest candle lights the dark”. The American poet is not professing faith in a deity, here, but rather marveling at the extraordinary power of the human imaginative faculty, which can conceive of – and through conceiving in a sense create and experience –just about anything, up to and including the force that governs our universe. There are shades of Schopenhauer’s aesthetics in this line, as there are in the poem’s concluding stanza: “Out of this same light, out of the central mind, / We make a dwelling in the evening air, / In which being there together is enough”. This is a possibility that most five-year-olds grasp instinctively, but which many adults, caught up in vain striving, are all too prone to forget.
In the underworld of Parafin’s basement space, Martinec presents Dance of Dreams (2021), a suite of some 70 of his dream drawings, overlooked by William Blake 1827 (2021) – a painting of the plaster death mask of the visionary English poet and print maker. (We should note that Francis Bacon made an earlier life mask of Blake the subject of a 1955 work). This figure, who at the age of eight reported seeing a tree filled with angels on a stroll through the London borough of Peckham, is an appropriate guardian of, or closed-eyed witness to, Martinec’s graphic record of his own nocturnal imaginings, which he makes quick sketches of each morning, while they are fresh in his mind, and to which he later returns to develop into finished works. There is, of course, something of the Jungian dream journal about this daily discipline, although the artist’s motive is not straightforwardly therapeutic. Rather, this practice is about accessing a way of seeing – a representation – that escapes us in our waking hours. Does our ceaseless willing abate while we sleep? Hardly, although there remains the question of what order of reality dreams belong to, what type of experience they represent.
For Schopenhauer, writing in The World as Will and Representation, the answer was clear: “Life and dreams are pages of one and the same book”. I suspect that Martinec might agree.
Pygmalion and Galatea
Chernobyl I
Chernobyl II 2020 on
The Dance of Dreams
Installation views Parafin, London, 2021
Hynek Martinec Biography
British/Czech
Born 1980, Broumov, Czech Republic
Lives and works in London
2004 Cooper Union, New York
2002 Middlesex University, London
1999-2005 Academy of Fine Art (MgA.), Prague
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2021 Will and Representation, Parafin, London
2019 The Everyday Archive, Brixton Beneficiary, London
2018 Voyage to Iceland, National Gallery, Prague Kilián Ignác D. Galerie Dom, Broumov
2017 El Greco Is Watching (ongoing project), Andalucia, Spain
The Birth of Tragedies, Parafin, London
2016 Hybrid, The Factory, London
2015 Intellectual Properties, Galerie Vaclava Spaly, Prague
2014 Every Minute You Are Closer To Death, Parafin, London
2013 Every Minute You Are Closer To Death, Flowers Gallery, London
2010 Lucky Man, Caroline Wiseman, London
2009 At The Same Time, Cosa Gallery, London After Holiday 1986, Czech Centre Gallery, Sofia
2008 Lost in Time, Cosa Gallery, London
2007 Czech Centre Gallery, Paris
Selected Group Exhibitions
2022 Still Life/Life Still, OHSH Projects, London MEN, Alšova jihočeská galerie, Hluboká nad Vltavou, Czech Republic
2021 The Will To Power: Miriam Austin, Hynek Martinec, Justin Mortimer, ASC Gallery, London
Vanitas, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague
2020 The Same For Everyone, Parafin, London
Inspiration - Iconic Works, Ateneum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
Inspiration - Iconic Works, Nationalmuseum Stockholm
2019 In Living Memory: An Exhibition of Contemporary Still-Life, Emo Court, Ireland Vanité, Brixton Beneficiary, London
2017 Fascination with Reality: Hyperrealsim in Czech Painting, Museum of Modern Art, Olomouc, Czech Republic
2017 Arc of Memory, Zahorian & Van Espen, Prague
2015 Blow Up: Painting, Photography and Reality, Parafin, London
2014 John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
2013 BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
2012 Beyond Reality: British Painting Today, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague Ein Weisses Feld, Schlachthaus Aschaffenburg, Germany Coal and Steel, Candid Arts Trust Gallery, London
Coal and Steel, Czech Centre Gallery, Prague
2011 Encoded Systems, Read Gate Gallery, London
2010 BP Portrait Award, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh
Passion for Freedom, UNIT 24 Gallery, London
TRANSFER, Czech National Building, New York
2009 BP Portrait Award, Southampton City Art Gallery, Southampton BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London Prague Biennale 4, Prague
TRANSFER, MG Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic
2008 TRANSFER, WhiteBOX Gallery, Munich International Triennale of Contemporary Art, National Gallery, Prague Re-Reading The Future, Project Mobility, National Gallery, Prague Defenestrace, Novom stská radnice Gallery, Prague
BP Portrait Award National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh
2007 BP Portrait Award, Tyne & Wear Museums, Newcastle BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London
2006 BLACK Art Festival, Pardubice, Czech Republic
2005 Prague Biennale, National Gallery, Prague Gallery Foundation M + J Anderle, Prague Prague’s Studios, Novom stká Radnice Gallery, Prague
2004 Cooper Union Gallery, New York
2003 tvercová leč ARTTODAY, Nová Sí Gallery, Prague
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Hynek Martinec Will and Representation
Parafin, London 26 November 2021 – 12 February 2022
Parafin 18 Woodstock Street London W1C 2AL +44 (0)20 7495 1969 info@parafin.co.uk www.parafin.co.uk @parafinlondon
Design: Matt Watkins
Print: Team Impression Photography: Paul Plews Installation photography: Peter Mallet
Hynek Martinec would like to thank Zuzka and Agnes This book is dedicated to Jacqueline du Pré
All works © Hynek Martinec 2022 Text © Tom Mortom 2022
