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Lukáš KÁNDL
Mas
195x97cm, oil on panel, 1987
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Mystical Lamb
130x130cm, oil on canvas, 2005
Annunciation Angel
195x162cm, oil on canvas, 2005
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Lukáš KÁNDL
The city of Prague which produced Kafka and Havel has helped to shape another artist who uses painting, rather than novels and drama or the art of statecraft, to illuminate important aspects of the human condition.
Lukáš Kándl’s antic surrealism draws upon many sources. They include the legacies of the disciplined drawings of his architect father; the profoundly religious expressions erupting from this corner of the Austro-Hungarian and Soviet empires; and the sense of fantasy and humor we associate with homo ludens France.
As an anthropologist and human being, I am struck by at least two gifts emerging from Kándl’s work: 1) an invitation to all viewers to open themselves up to the proposition that tolerance and acceptance of ambiguity is the basis for survival; and 2) a dazzling generosity of sharing personal visions which others might restrict to their psychoanalysts or priest confessors. He bears his liquid soul. He is an enemy of literalism. Bizarre shapes, vivid colors, disembodied objects and body parts, anatomical distortions, juxtapositions of time and place (the Champs Elysées and the inferno), fuzzy genders and sinister felines which might seduce you to dare to cuddle—for just a dangerous moment . . . These are the stuff of his dreams of the night. They fade at dawn, but linger in one’s mind to bring magic to mundane experience.
My fantasy is to show his paintings, and at least one sculpted chair, to the Makonde sculptors in Africa and to encourage the Makonde to trade their gifts with Kándl. (Picasso learned from the Baoul‚ of the Côte d’Ivoire.) They both deal with the spirit world in which Kafka-esque metamorphoses constantly undermine « reality. » It is no wonder that such personal art is anathema to totalitarian regimes.
The Bohemian Kándl conveys another truth earlier proclaimed by the French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss:
« In the concrete is the whole. » I think of a woman’s empty, red satin shoe with high heels. Kándl might clone the shoe and attach it to, say, nine legs of a fawn racing
through the filtered light of Debussy’s forest of Saint-Germain. A French horn making sounds without a player might swing beside a sword or a pistol used in royal duels. Concrete objects are electrified by Kándl’s brush.
This gentle, loving, kind and handsome Kándl, like Einstein, is a victorious child who has never lost his sense of wonder. It can be contagious. Puritan dictators beware!
Wilton S. Dillon
Senior Scholar Emeritus
Smithsonian Institution
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