Július Koller — Untitled

The painting ´Untitled´ can be categorized as a cycle of spray paintings in which Koller worked with different symbols and punctuation marks. The key components of Koller´s work were terms, signs and text. Yet in the early phase of his creation in the 1960s he created with help of seals different textual cards – notices. Typical for him was the question mark with which he doubted everything around him and placed infinite series of questions, to which he didn´t expect any answers, though.

In the painting ´Untitled´ we can see the mixture of multicoloured symbols (black Slovak double cross, red star, white symbol of dollar, yellow swastika) which merge and create a rather chaotic, but at the same time homogenous body. By choosing easily decoded and universally known symbols Koller tried to find a vital communication tool, by means of which he wanted to express his personal attitudes. In this case it is a mixture of symbols addressing different socio-political systems (nacism, communism, capitalism) that were changing throughout the 20th century in Europe as well as in Slovakia. The historical development of our society is summarized on a very subtle scale and with the help of a radical contentual shortcut. The author outlines with the merge of the symbols that all dictatorships as well as the ´free´ political systems like capitalism are based on the same principle. In the context of Koller´s work we can understand this fact as suppressing of the individual freedom. Koller was the supporter of an absolute freedom not only in art world, but also in life, because he perceived art and life as identical parts of one´s existence.

From the formal point of view this painting is interesting because of the spray, grey backround and gestic, sometimes primitive handwriting which evokes graffiti. Similar symbols sprayed on the walls in the cities all around the world are anonymous expressions of generalized attitudes, that have no further meaning, or they don´t present artist´s personal point of view. They only serve as signals and are the straightforward expression of an individual who is trying to address the audience. In Koller´s case this chaotic mixture of attitudes expresses similarly to graffiti his personal attitude and in this way the viewer receives much more space for interpretation of an artwork and especially can be confronted with his message.