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Text: Pavel Piekar

“The beauty of the world is hidden. We needlessly lose thousands of perspectives because we were not able to see the world in the precincts of its transformational and purifying radiance. We do not know the full richness of our own landscapes. In the noontime sun, we are barely able to orient ourselves by our shadows to the mysterious corners of the world.

After six days of labour and building the world, beauty is the seventh day of the soul. It is the harmonious exhalation of eternal volition, the creative vision, which has flowed through all future universes flowering from the seeds of the first stars, and has found that everything is good, a radiant vision, unbearable to the finite, captured by eternity, resting invisibly in all worlds until the end of time.”

Otokar Březina – The Beauty of the World

On the left is a vista into a house; in the centre, a sheet is hanging in the garden; on the right, a little bit to the back, a man examines a fruit tree; and in the background stretches the open space of the landscape with fruit trees. It’s a clear day with a few small clouds. In the house and in the garden young children – angels – are playing, and their mother is by their side; their father is moving around the garden. This is the composition of a painting by Jan Knap, a composition which through its visual elements aims to depict the invisible – the divine spirit and divine light. The path to the picture is, however, a long one. This exhibition shows the various stages of preparation that enable this painting full of clarity and hope to originate.

The artist’s approach to his paintings you understand by seeing the artist in his studio. The primary impulse comes from his sketchbooks, full of different combinations of figural movements in various types of lighting conditions and in architecturally diverse environments – these provide him with a constant source of inspiration, from which he draws when considering specific compositions. This phase is followed by larger wash drawings and watercolours in which the artist already is getting closer to the final composition. But not even these drawings have the definitive composition that he will mechanically transfer to the canvas, but merely serve an aid in preparing the final composition. After these preparations, the creation of the image itself is very long and laborious, and even though Jan has a lifetime of creative experience, it does not make his work any easier. On the contrary, because of his demands for perfection in his own work, it increases it.

With his creation, the artist answers only to God, and it does not matter whom else he happens to serve. Jan Knap is a servant of God.

Pavel Piekar