Juraj Kollár — The Landscape Tour

Juraj Kollár is one of the most distinctive young Slovak painters. His work follows the traditional painting discipline principles, whether by focusing solely on oil painting or classical genres such as landscape, portrait, nude or still life. Kollár’s characteristic features include visible brush strokes, subtle colour scheme and a signature style balancing between reality and abstraction. He uses impulsive, gestic, rough pasty style conceding numerous layers of underpainting. The impressionistic legacy of Kollár’s work is represented by frequent urban motives, capturing specific moments, his work with lights and reflections, applying various spots or surfaces that only come together once we look at the artwork from a certain distance. Another impressionistic feature is the actual division of the painting’s surface. The artist uses a grid system to divide the work into a complicated structure of elements. The painting is either covered with netting that rasterises it into a set of points or divided into smaller form factors, as in the case of the Landscape Tour that has 48 parts. 

It is a part of his composed images series, depicting a view through glass bricks, that Kollár has been working on for the last decade. It is a rather large, vertically oriented composition created by arranging smaller square canvases into 6 columns and 8 rows. The actual image is abstract. The only evidence that the motive actually represents a landscape, or rather its reflection, can be found in the work’s title or in a comparison with the artists’ previous pieces. The only expressive and emotional means of the work is its colour scheme and the way it is used. Almost the whole surface is covered with white or grey-white, representing clouds. The only exception is the black “framing”, describing the tone of the protruding “mass” of the glass bricks and the blue surface of the sky in the right part that emphasises the work’s dynamic composition. The overall dynamics of the piece are enhanced by expressive brush strokes prevailing on every single of the incorporated canvases. 

The Landscape Tour uses a similar motive and composition method as other Kollár’s works, such as The View of the Landscape (2001), Winter Landscape (2018) or some of his more recent ones, Treetop (2012), Les Invalides Paris (2014) or Still Life (2017). All of the paintings share a fascination by the various ways we can look at and perceive life. The artist also focuses on different ways of disturbing the visual image: blurring, rasterising, clouding, fragmenting. Kollár extracts reality in order to puzzle the viewer. He analyses, doubts and changes our traditional view of the landscape, world and reality.