Dotcom Music

Ondřej Kopal Curated by Pavel Vančát 02. 04. 2014 Facebook event

Edith Jeřábková showed me Ondřej Kopal’s work some time ago. After that, together we got three of his paintings into the Klatovy Museum collection to show Richard Adam that we understand painting as well. Even then, I was fascinated by the economically ironic bravura with which Ondřej inserted frightened figures of skeletons into schematic drawings of means of transport or collagically combined the attributes of individual exotic states into a travel series of paintings. It was only recently that I was surprised to find out that Ondřej is two years older than me, so he is already attacking the “middle generation” category, and a large book is being prepared for him in his native Liberec. He deserves it, because in the Czech Republic there are only a few painters like him, able to balance detail with the pictorial whole, to enclose a set of lapidary references in a coherent area and at the same time not to paint only for effect and chance.

Ondřej composes his thematic cycles as a series, retrospectively testing his own load-bearing capacity, which always have relatively fixed, predefined formal and content definitions. His latest series Dotcom Music addresses the world of musical legends, or iconic corpses. Our late favorites are becoming virtual zombies, trapped in their own web presentations. It is actually a series about death and glory today. Mozart next to Cobain, Gainsbourg v. Jackson (only Madonna is a derisive exception confirming the rule). This time, the image plans are more firmly defined, as if virtual totalitarianism dictates graphic frames. But it is within these boundaries that all the small attributes of the musical and virtual spheres can begin to vary, which together form a set of coats of arms of the fallen heroes of today.

Pavel Vančát, Bratislava, 2 April 2014, 12:15