Tomas Rajlich

Selected Bibliography

ARKESTEIJN Roel. Tomas Rajlich: A Retrospective in six paintings.
Heden, Den Haag 2008.
BLOK Cor (ed.). Nederlandse kunst: vanaf 1900.
TELEAC, Utrecht 1994.
BLOTKAMP Carel. "Tomas Rajlich" in Bulletin.
Galerie Collection d'Art, Amsterdam 1972.
BLOTKAMP Carel. Lof der Tekenkunst.
Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1973.
BLOTKAMP Carel & HAKS Frans et al. Kunst van nu: Encyclopedisch overzicht vanaf 1960.
Elsevier, Amsterdam 1995.
BONOMI Giorgio. Tomas Rajlich: La monocromia anche.
Fondazione Zappettini, Milano 2007.
BOOL Flip. "Tussen tekenen en schilderen" in Het oog op Den Haag: actuele Haagse beeldende kunst.
Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 1986.
BOOL Flip. Tomas Rajlich.
Galleria Peccolo, Livorno 1987.
BOOL Flip. En Suite.
HCAK, Den Haag 1992.
BROOS Kees. Tomas Rajlich.
Groninger Museum, Groningen 1975.
BROOS Kees. "Tomas Rajlich" in Elementary Forms.
Ministerie van CRM, Den Haag 1975.

BROOS Kees. Tomas Rajlich.
Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 1978.
BROŽEK Libuše. "Tomas Rajlich" in Bulletin.
Centraal Museum, Utrecht 1978.
COLLOVINI Diego. Suoni della superficie.
Villotta & Bergamo, Portogruaro 2001.
DE BOER Cees. Aspekte Niederländischer Kunst heute.
Städtische Galerie, Lüdenscheid 1996.
DIPPEL Rini. Fundamentele Schilderkunst.
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 1975.

GUALDONI Flaminio & PETERS Philip. Tomas Rajlich: opere 1969 -1993.
Palazzo Martinengo, Brescia 1993.
HONNEF Klaus. Jaap Berghius, Tomas Rajlich & Martin Rous.
Westfalischer Kunstverein, Münster 1975.
IMANSE Geurt (ed.). De Nederlandse Identiteit in de Kunst na 1945.
Meulenhoff, Amsterdam 1984.
LAGEIRA Jacinto. Tomas Rajlich: Nacre et Paillette.
Dům umění, České Budějovice 2005.
LAMARCHE-VADEL Bernard & MENNA Filliberto. Fracture du Monochrome aujourd'hui en Europe.
ARC Paris / Musée d'Art Moderne de la?Ville de Paris, Paris 1978.
LOCHER Hans. Tomas Rajlich.
Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 1971.
LOCHER Hans. Tomas Rajlich.
Haags Gemeentemuseum, Den Haag 1979.
MUSSA Italo. / colori della pittura: una situazione europea.
Istituto Italo-Latino Americano, Roma 1976.
OLIVA Achille Bonito. Europe-America: The Different Avant-Gardes.
Deco Press, Milano 1976.
PAALMAN Hans. Tomas Rajlich.
Schiedams Museum, Schiedam 1971.
PEGORARO Silvia. Toccare con gli occhi e con la mente: la pittura di Tomas Rajlich.
Fabbri CA, Milano 2010.
PEGORARO Silvia & ZANCHETTA Alberto. Toccare la Luce: la pittura di Tomas Rajlich.
Museo Michetti, Francavilla al Mare (CH) 2010.
PETERS Philip. "Kunst van Tomas Rajlich: tasten en zoeken, tobben en afzien"
in De Tijd (15/10/1982).
PETERS Philip. "De eeuwige ruimte: het goud van Tomas Rajlich"
in Museumjournaal 6 (1986).
PETERS Philip. "The Metaphysical Monochrome or the Perfect Painting?"
in Kunst en Museumjournaal 4/5 (1993).
PETERS Philip et al. Tomas Rajlich: Kresby 1965-1976.
Galerie Zámek Klenová, Klatovy 1997.
REISING Gert. Farbe, Felder, Philosophie: Ein ästhetischer Dialog.
Chorus, Mainz 2000.
REISING Gert. Tomas Rajlich: Recent Paintings.
Jiri Svestka Gallery, Praha 2003.
RUYTERS Domenik. Tomas Rajlich: Ouborg Prijs 1994.
Stroom HCBK, Den Haag 1994.
RUYTERS Domenik. "Sensibele Strukturen"
in NIKE, New Art in Europe 54.
SOLIMANO Sandra et al. Pensare Pittura: Una Linea Internazionale di Ricerca negli Anni Settanta.
Silvana Editoriale, Milano 2009.
Tomas Rajlich, "Toccare la luce"
incl. an interview with the artist on ArteTV, 25 September 2011.
VALOCH Jiří. Tomas Rajlich.
Dům umění, Brno 1998.
VISSER Ad de. De Tweede Helft (Kunst na 1945).
SUN, Nijmegen 1998.
ZANCHETTA Alberto. Tomas Rajlich: L'inesorabile divenire.
Massetti Rodella Editori, Brescia 2008.

______________

Tomas Rajlich. Half a century of painting, roughly

Flaminio Gualdoni

Tomas Rajlich, Prague, 1940. This is how the unknown artist presented himself in the Netherlands in 1969, in exile from the Soviet invasion of his country that was to last twenty years.

Nothing was known then, and still little is known today, about the extraordinarily effervescent state of postwar Czech culture in which Rajlich grew up: Skupina 42, the group that formed around Jindřich Chalupecký and fixed a clear gaze on the European avant-garde (one of its illustrious members, Jiří Kolář, stayed in Prague until the Charta 77 affair, before fleeing to Paris in 1980);¹ the UB 12 group that emerged at the beginning of the Sixties with figures like Václav Boštík and Stanislav Kolíbal;² as well as the Klub Konkretistů, founded in 1967 by Tomas Rajlich, Jiří Hilmar, Radek Kratina and Arsén Pohribny. As young artists, they took up radical visibilista positions after gaining a precise notion of the experiments of Azimut in Italy, Zero in Germany and Nul in the Netherlands. He was interested in the repeated interweaving of solid and protruding physical shapes or in outlines reduced to basic graphic cells that proliferated in a uniform pattern on the surface.

Rajlich was born a sculptor and as such was chosen by Jiří Mašín as an exponent of the new avant-garde for his international debut, the exhibition Sculpture Tchécoslovaque de Myslbek à nos jours in the Musée Rodin in Paris in 1968.³ But the Netherlands acted as a tremendous accelerator in clarifying his vision; besides offering a wealth of suggestions, it immediately revealed to him the road of painting. The neo-avant-garde that was rooted there – the exhibition Nul promoted by Willem Sandberg and organised by Henk Peeters in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam was a mile-stone in the early years of the 1960s⁴ – and the availability of the best theoretical and experimental material in circulation in a quantity incomparable with the information that was reaching Prague were a decisive shock for Rajlich. He found a full exposition of the rationale behind Piero Manzoni’s colourless achromes and Yves Klein’s monochromes, which were above all an objective understanding of colour in itself and a pragmatic use of it in making paintings in various gradations of a metaphysical character, at the very moment in which another generation of lucid conceptual proclamations was ridding itself once and for all of any aesthetic or exemplary residue in the work of its predecessors. From 1969 on the gallery Art & Project, which had opened in Amsterdam only a year earlier, presented such artists as Lawrence Weiner, Stanley Brouwn, Sol Lewitt and Gilbert & George, exponents of Rajlich’s own generation, while that of Riekje Swart, who was active from 1964, moved on from a more openly conceptual emphasis, from Marinus Boezem to Ger van Elk and Sol LeWitt, to more Neo-Constructivist positions – Bob Bonies, Ad Dekkers, Peter Struycken, and Jan Dibbets.

In this lively context, Rajlich’s paintings immediately assumed one of the most lucid and radical positions, as shown explicitly and unambiguously in the double exhibition held in the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in 1971,⁵ making him a key figure in the radical questioning of the process and language of painting. It was a painting pared down to its first moments, relentlessly concentrated in the analysis and scrutiny of the roots of its own existence as painting: artifice and discipline, a device for the meaning and practice of expression. What counted most at this moment was not so much the reference to the Minimalist painters of the United States who were currently showing in Europe – Robert Ryman exhibited at Heiner Friedrich’s gallery in Munich and Konrad Fischer’s in Düsseldorf in 1968, and in the following year in “When attitudes become form” in the Kunsthalle in Bern⁶ – but rather to the European roots, the broad field activated by Piero Manzoni’s achromes. Rajlich evoked his structuring that was essential to the rectangular grid of the surface, and to a lesser extent Yves Klein, around whose idea of monochromes Udo Kultermann had put together the exhibition “Monochrome Malerei” in 1960 with a choice of painters ranging from Lucio Fontana to Azimut, and from ZERO to positions that were radical in different ways such as that of Raimund Girke.⁷

Rajlich’s Untitled series from the early years of the 1970s questioned painting in its materiality as a physical substance, as corporeal matter, in the development of the distilled and intensive direction in which he had already been experimenting from 1966 on during his Prague years. This was a counter-melody to the basic structuration provided by repeated cells or the basic pattern of horizontals and verticals obtained by addition or subtraction.⁸

The decisive step came in 1974 with the triad of solo exhibitions in the Yvon Lambert gallery in Paris (where he had shown in the “VIII^e Biennale de Paris” in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in the previous year), Art & Project in Amsterdam, and Françoise Lambert in Milan.

Rajlich now tended to leave the material density of the painting clear, remaining as decisive irritations and disturbances in the painted surface, and to produce works that were more openly expressive.

It was a decisive moment, also because the Netherlands was one of the places in which the upsurge of what is variously called analytical or fundamental painting was taking place, amid a variety of national idioms and attitudes that emerged clearly in the flood of exhibitions that succeeded one another in Europe from the early 1970s.⁹

On 25 April 1975 “Fundamentele schilderkunst : Fundamental painting” opened in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Curated by Rini Dippel under the directorship of Edy de Wilde, it included Jaap Berghuis, Jake Berthot, Louis Cane, Alan Charlton, Raimund Girke, Richard Jackson, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, Agnes Martin, Tomas Rajlich, Edda Renouf, Gerhard Richter, Stephen Rosenthal, Robert Ryman, Kees Smits, Rob van Koningsbruggen, Marthe Wéry, and Jerry Zeniuk.¹⁰ In the same year Rajlich, Berghius and Martin Rous were the three artists from the Netherlands who showed in the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, where Klaus Honnef had organised the large-scale exhibition “Geplante Malerei” in the previous year.¹¹

It was Honnef who, with Hans Sizoo, launched the travelling exhibition Elementaire Vormen (Bonn, Saarbücken, Nuremberg, Saint-Étienne, etc.) in May 1975 to demonstrate the richness of the specific Dutch situation: Akkerman, Berghuis, Buurman, Fernhout, Van der Heyden, Hoving, Van Koningsbruggen, Rajlich, Rous, Schoonhoven, Verhoef, Visser, and Van de Wint.¹² These were heavily theoretical years, and the concern for reducing the complexity of a singularly open and shifting artistic panorama to clear interpretative patterns favoured a simplification by affinity rather than an appreciation of singularities and excesses. That basic affinity consisted in a dedication to painting in its specific quality as a medium, a refusal to countenance any lingering Dadaism or loss of disciplinary rigour as proclaimed in “When attitudes become form” and by the strict Conceptualists.

Of course, it was painting at a high and relentlessly cerebral level, above all in its questioning attitude – a critical calling into question of painting in the very act of painting itself. At the same time, however, it was also an attempt to shake off the historical ballast of the discipline in order to maintain and affirm its creative identity. For many it was a claim to the inevitable necessity of the pictorial – its metaphysical mark discernible in genealogies traced back to Malevich

, Mondrian, Reinhardt, Klein – and therefore the more convincing hypothesis of the continuity of a historical identity, that of painting. In spite of its fortunes and crises, however extreme, in the end it did not fail to present itself as the crucial disciplinary point of articulation that for centuries had been the hallmark of what is artistic.

This concern to define a highly homogeneous territory was more of a theoretical and in some respects strategic choice as a barrier against the progressive tendency of art vivant towards non-painterly or extra-painterly forms, or experiences that not only stepped outside the medium but openly presented themselves as championing the negation of painting, an element that provoked ambiguity rather than clarity. Proof of this can be found in the extremely well-attended “documenta 6” held in Kassel in 1977. Within a year attempts were being made to draw distinctions. The most explicit was “Fractures du monochrome aujourd’hui en Europe”, at the ARC in Paris in 1978, where Rajlich was one of the exponents. Bernard Lamarche-Vadel wrote of the analysis of “different modes of fracturing, because I believe that in the fracture of the monochrome, in the space and moment of this fracture, something new is happening in art which has nothing to do with the minimalist mechanics of which we have seen too much already and which, for therapeutic reasons, we should abandon”, moving towards “fractures that do not generate a system, because I struggle against systems.”¹³

aptly summed it up when he wrote that monochrome can also “represent the mystical, internalisation, contemplation, the imperceptible, the unspeakable, the infinite/eternal, pure sensibility, nothing. Or revolt, refusal”, because, in the face of “visual pollution, monochrome can be an aesthetic hygiene” and therefore “a zone of purity, beauty, well-being, concentration, simplicity, quintessence, integrity”.¹⁴

Still, it is clear that, if at the time the structure of orthogonal grids, the absolute austerity in the use of colour, and the sense of seriality implicit in Rajlich’s work were gains at every other level of interpretation, today we can note the persistence of the irrational component and of the aleatory indeterminacy of the painterly acts, however implicated and preserved in the act of painting, leading one of his most attentive and continuous observers, Philip Peters, to write years later that his concrete actions “also refer to a different type of experience, a world of dreams, thoughts and actions that cannot be explained easily from a logical point of view”.¹⁵

In other words, in the repeated geometrical grid that functioned as all-over spatial lens and specific space of experience, the minimalist aspect was seized upon first, perhaps losing sight of the fact that it was rather the primary foundation – with precise historical roots, from Neo-Plasticism to Constructivism – of a concreteness of the field of action and vision without which any painterly act would have become no more than a stale formalist exercise. “Form fascinates when it is no longer able to encompass the force that is inside it, the creative force”, wrote Jacques Derrida.¹⁶ So Rajlich’s how was overexposed and framed, neglecting the fact that from then on he was aiming, by way of purified intentional acts that were even carried to the limit of conceptual torment, at a painting of substance and energy that would go beyond the merely optical phenomenon – after the Kleinian saut dans le vide, precise pulsations of a possible meaning.

The systematic aspect, the regularity of the process, the insistence on the non-illusionist visual concreteness of two dimensions, were for him necessary premises without which in the application of colour and its actions – understood in turn in their most complete plenitude and physical tangibility – he would have been unable to concentrate on the question of his identity, character and vocation.

In 1993, when for more than a decade the artist had been weaving dense, irregular patterns of black/colour and yellow, and hints of pink and sky blue, cautiously taking on even gold, filling almost the entire surface, incising it too with horizontal and vertical grooves cut out of the rugged material (these incisions were already heralded in an incunabulum from the early 1970s), I happened to write: “Colour, splashed on in short, tormented cadences, occupying by itself the whole of the image, is devoid of any instrumental or compositional logic and any linguistic hierarchy: it is, and offers itself, as image, as a substance that is itself to be seen: as light”.¹⁷

And there is ever less colourlessness and ever more light in the tonal variations on white with which the artist made the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s: light, slightly impoverished because intuitively captured in a moment, all in the service of clarity. Playing with colour, which had been put in brackets for a long time along with the phantom of chromaticism, now became possible because the analytical experience had obliterated any even remotely naturalistic filiation: the colour is understood a priori as self-referential, an affirmation of itself for itself, without implying more explicit ideological or theoretical statements.

By now the paintings had become extensions of light, concentrated and pure epiphanies, even capable of bearing a symbolic charge. The rightness of this direction has been shown by the successive stages of the artist, in which the farsightedness of the act permits fuller confidences and stimuli, and cadences that tend to dominate the pronounced optical tension of the surface. There are colours such as black but also gold – a metaphysical turn with mystical roots. With even greater determination, Rajlich operates on the plane of the saturated image; but now this saturation does not only concern vision; it is rather a plenitude that involves the very idea of light associated, in our culture, with the sense of colour and supernatural vertigo.

This is the moment of the outburst, if only in the operational brightness of one who can but regard painting as an autonomous, physical basis of language and meaning, of more than an echo of wisdom.

In Rajlich’s paintings, in a concentration that is now for him complete and unfettered freedom, these are the years for which the words of the old German specialist Shmuel Sambursky seem to ring true: “yes, colour is by its very nature the appearance and emanation of light”.¹⁸ It is an epiphany in the sense of a divine hypothesis. Or the mood of the highly ambiguous Sefiroth of the Kabbala. Or the well-considered receptivity to a popular culture – for Rajlich, a Czech by birth, the anthropologically rich Slav tradition – with its pagan symbolic complexes in which white, black and gold, and blue and red, are the very pillars of an entire cultural cosmos. A recent interpretation of the artist’s work by Jiří Valoch points in this direction,¹⁹ while Gert Reising wrote in 2003 that Rajlich’s latest works had become “seductive or even lascivious in their Baroque-Bohemian character by comparison with the objective austerity of their ancient predecessors”, stressing the “hieratic-heraldic aspect in their formal proportions” and the desire “to remain a painting, not a setting, not a mise en scène, not a media event, but remaining solidly in the dignity of the image obtained by painting”.²⁰

From one painting to another, the spiritual tension in Rajlich’s work evolves, breathes, lives. The up-to-datedness, the original component of feeling oneself a member of the avant-garde, fades in these works, while the painting itself remains: “a zone of purity, beauty, well-being, concentration, simplicity, quintessence, integrity”.