Vladimír Havrilla — On the Beach

Vladimír Havrilla is a key figure of Slovak multimedia art. His work is mostly focused on sculpture, painting, drawing, conceptual art, computer graphics and animation, film and literature. He incorporates various materials and work processes and likes to interpret other artists, mostly modernists and avant-garde artists like Seraut, Mondrian, Matisse, Maillol, Moore, Brancusi, Pollock, Lichtenstein, Vasarely, Galanda… He has designed several fountains and authored various architectural and exterior pieces. In his early days, he preferred to work with plaster for its ease of use, simple processing, white colour, lightness and purity. He also worked with polystyrene and aluminium, but also with traditional materials like wood and stone. He was among the first experimental filmmakers in Slovakia. He shot the films on his 8mm camera mostly during the 1970s. Some of his best known films from this period are Bird Woman (1972), Lift (1974) or No Limit (1976). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he belonged to a group of action and conceptual artists (Ľubomír Ďurček, Ján Budaj, Peter Bartoš, Róbert Cyprich, Ľuba Lauffová, Igor Kalný, the theoretician Tomáš Štraus and others) who held private art performances in their apartments or in the outdoors. He has created over a hundred themes and drawings for short animated and conceptual films as well as literary themes and screenplays for various feature films. He is also the author of poems, but writes mostly short stories. Many of his works belong to larger thematic groups that overlap and affect each other. His “metaphysical comic strips” (Dušan Brozman) combine various archetypal principles of men and women with androgynous sci-fi fantasies. He is interested in art mostly for its beauty, poetics and playfulness. Since the 1990s, he has been creating graphic and film art mostly with the help of 3D software. Lately, he has also focused on 3D printing, but also paper and other ephemeral materials. His work – influenced by Zen philosophy – has been leaning towards dematerialisation and virtuality, or as he puts it “an effort not to take up space”. ¹

The luminous object that is a part of the Nitra Gallery’s collection is titled On the Beach and depicts an abstract lying figure. It is made of transparent plexiglass with several circular and elliptical cut-outs. The object’s flatness is disrupted with its curved central part. There are four blue-coloured diodes installed in the object. The blue colour is supposed to evoke sea and summer sky. The roughly outlined elegant curves of the female body are obviously influenced by Havrilla’s favourite modernist sculptors. The time-proven form is combined with the possibilities of the current technology. The light, even tough it is intangible, becomes the substance the sculptor uses to outline his artistic shortcut. The Nitra Gallery’s piece resembles an older sculpture of the same title that the artist created in 2012, but with different materials (glass, aluminium, brass), a found object (door handle) and kept it flat while putting it on a typical pedestal.

Our object features more “streamlined” curves and interpretations that are in line with the already mentioned Zen approach. Nevertheless, Havrilla “kind of plays a double agent”. ² He even admits – had he had the chance (had the former regime allowed him), he would not have dealt with conceptual art, object art or 3D computer art, but rather carved giant blocks of marble. ³

In this regard, Havrilla once wrote: “…if I had a large studio, I would start carving marble statues right away. Carve and polish marble. I have only started with computers and 3D modelling because it was the cheaper alternative. The best possible experience is slamming and grinding a piece of marble in the middle of the summer and observe how the shapeless mass turns into an elegant form. Juraj Rusňák once said that carving a sculpture is an experience – both intellectual and physical one – you can feel all the way from the tips of your toes to the tips of your fingers. What is more, when the sun is shining, you can even get a tan. And a weak man becomes – to put it in a Mexican term – a macho. It is a great experience. Everything is possible in this crazy world, so I might even be able to get myself a studio once. Henry Moore said that a sculptor can produce 12 great sculptures a year, which makes it 120 in the next ten years. Forgive me, computer, the call of the marble wins! In the 3D studio, it is just a play on light. The ancient Chinese used to say that even matter – like stone or wood – is a kind of a light. I agree. Constantin Brancusi realised it as well. When you turn the screen off, it does not leave any trace. Everything disappears. You can jump from one world to another and back again. You have the ability to turn at least one of the worlds off. And all the mess disappears. Total clearance. Nothing is left. Not just metaphorically, realistically. Just like in the good old days…” ⁴