GALERIE KUROVSKÝ

The personality of this artist presents us with both a problem and kind of psychological riddle. The paintings themselves - their symbolism, their visions of monsters, devils and demons - embody an exceptional spiritual experience, to express a message.

Moral instability and psychological uncertainty is the heavy toll which generations living in times of transition are bound to pay. The paintings of MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ provide a forceful reminder of the complexity of human personality; the violence of men´s fears; the corruption, which can only partially be hidden under the superficial respectability, the social rank and function.
We are now faced with the painter´s fantastic caprices embodying a message and produced by his inexhaustible imagination, and yet, strictly controlled by an outstanding sense of form and composition.

MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's work helps to stimulate our own imagination. Visionary experience, with its revelation of the demoniacal aspects of the human personality, and of the constant persistence of evil in even the most serene character may enable us to approach the divine and sublime elements with grater concentration and awareness. He is an artist who succeeds in communicating both aspects, having the courage to paint man as he really is in the inner depth of his nature.

His paintings are both mystical and humanistic. His work assumes the appearance of an antiworld in which the works of man's hands seem to take on their own and turn against him.

Kurovský´s art succeeds in communicating its creator's mystical ecstasy to those who will never during their mortal existence experience ecstasy at first hand. Hardly anybody, except Hieronymus Bosch, has been able to convey the semantically inexpressible with such clarity, simplicity and power.

The art of MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ is so complex and multidimensional - in its hierarchically expressed as well as cryptically hidden meanings of symbols - that its comprehensive analysis would require far more space. It seems however necessary to comment on at least the most evident and most characteristic traits of his paintings.

The symbols - which abound in his work - spring from a boundless power of the artist's fantasy but always they are used with a very definite purpose. It can be said that the mighty outflow of his creative powers is entirely original. The paintings display a very different kind of their creator's deep sensitivity and even visionary experience, revealing the omnipresence of evil but compensating it with the inherent belief in good principles. The paintings themselves, their symbolism embody a spiritual message, expressing it in a very imaginative impact. They depict the world of human beings, not as an exact reflection of its observable characters but as a presentation of its irrational yet real traits.
Kurovský's own and very specific method of the semiotic treatment of the hidden (but inherent) farthest corners of our consciousness may be interpreted as the visualization of the irreal interrelationships between the human soul and its bodily environment on one hand - and between the present human action and its future consequences on the other hand.

MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ deals basically with the following items:

a) the visualization of the very inner problems of Man - such as:
the genesis of a complex, the impact of such complex upon his health as can be seen from his paintings of human beings accompanied by demons and monsters. Here MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ attempts at depicting those subtle and often hard-to-be-defined realities that were semantically treated in the works of greatest men of science like Freud, Jung, Fromm etc. Where Freud and his successors would use words, MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ uses a specific kind of a visual code. Even the super modern technical equipment of any kind absolutely lacks the ability to visualize human psyche. Where technology fails, MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's inborn genius succeeds.

And even more: MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's paintings bridge the gap between the language of ancient mysticism and the language of contemporary sciences of psychology and psychiatry. This can be seen, by a sensitive observer, in paintings like "The Genesis of a complex"; "Yahweh"; "El Shaddai"; "The Lonely Rabbi"; "Pain of the Consciousness"; "Exodus from …where… & what?"; "Christ contemplating"; "Virgo intacta"; "Nobody in a strange land"; "The esoteric conflict"; "Gone with Time" and many others.

b) the visualisation of the human impact upon Nature. Here MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ anticipates the consequences of human activity, which if present trend would not be cosseted or changed, will inevitably lead to irreversible fatal changes of our environment.

Such terms as air pollution, water pollution, loss of forests and the complete exhaustion of natural resources, found a purely new semiotic form, as well as visual connotation, in the artist's visions of treeless landscapes, apocalyptically-looking lands, and weird ocean surfaces enlightened by bizarre Suns. Renowned are this artist's horrifying concrete towns composed of monolithic blocks with no windows (for there is no longer any reason to look at the world around). Well, such are the paintings called "The Planetary Imperative"; "Arbor Vitae"; "Dreamtown"; "Bequest of Mankind"; "The Last Day of Jerusalem"; "The Genesis of Apocalypse"; "Cosmic Ghetto"; "Panta Rhei"; "Longing of a deserted Planet" and others.

c) From the artists' works it is evident that he understands our world as part of a far more complex entity, ie. the Universe. MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ also intuitively forecasts the possible reaction of the Universe oriented toward the disastrously changing Planet Earth. His imagination thus foresees, as he himself calls it, the Space's counterattacks so that he paints "Inferno"; "And only Stones survived it..."; "The definitive Victory of Viral Epidemics"; "Cosmic Forces have finally contacted Us"; "We are not alone in the Universe"; "The Cancer Probability"; "Virus the Conqueror"; "The promised Land 2000"; "Whose Victory?"; "The Last Sunset" and several others.

d) another item comprised within the artist's work is "the message of symbols". He lets his symbolic expressions act freely upon the observers' souls, by the creative "purification" of the symbols' meanings. Such are for example his "The Eternity of Spiral"; "The Ear of Johann Sebastian Bach"; "Tortures of Longing"; "Omnia ab Ovo"; "The Harmony of Irreal Relations"; "The Total Exodus"; "Planetary Contemplations" etc.

It is deeply incorporated in our human character that we eagerly want to classify natural objects (animals, plants) - as well as human works like paintings. And from just that point of view MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's work is well beyond the currently adopted systematics and classification schemes. It is not a surrealism neither a naivism - let alone any other "ism".

MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's originality lies in the fact that he combines irrational and irreal objects and environments as being in real space-time relationships. Mention must also here be made that his originality further stems form his own painting technique called "fixed pastel chalks on velvety velour paper", for short. After experimenting with conventional techniques, like oil on canvas &c., he decides to go his own way after he has devised his own "pastel-velour" method best suiting his purposes to create colour compositions that convey purposefully his ideas by means of subtle unconscious influences upon our psychology.

It is hardly possible to pass by along MILOŠ KUROVSKÝ's paintings and not to be at least touched by them. So, this great artist´s creation fully fulfill the inner meaning of an ancient maxim "Esse est percipi" ("to be - means to be percepted").

This text: Dr. Petr Nohel, Hellichova 7, CZ-118 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic