Vladimír Houdek presents his second solo exhibition at acb Gallery in Budapest under the title Parallel Self. With this exhibition, the Czech artist opens a new chapter in his oeuvre following his abstract geometric cycle dominated by various shades of yellow. In his new paintings, Houdek returns to the collage technique—also familiar from his earlier practice—while the backgrounds of the works are now animated by almost indecipherably layered, splattered expressive painterly gestures. At the center of the paintings, however, there is always a male figure in which we may also recognize the artist’s faceless, universal protagonist. In this context, the figure evokes the sense of a kind of time traveler, one not constrained by the space-time continuum as we experience it in our reality. The relationship between the gesture-filled backgrounds and the figures suggests that the images behind them may originate in imagined landscapes—ones that might not even belong to our planet.
From an art-historical perspective, the proportions and compositions of Houdek’s new paintings can also be read as a tribute to the giant of Romanticism, Caspar David Friedrich, and to his later Czech follower Jakub Schikaneder. At the same time, the acrylic-painted backgrounds draw inspiration from the pointillism of Georges Seurat and the brushwork of Claude Monet, as well as from the landscapes of Gustav Klimt and the painting of Joan Mitchell. The archetypal image behind the series is Friedrich’s painting The Chasseur in the Forest: a solitary figure standing in the midst of a vast landscape, where the essence of the human merges with that of nature, balancing order and chaos. A person travels in the midst of nothingness and everything. We do not know where he comes from or where he is heading. We do not know his name or his story. We must imagine all of this ourselves—and follow the wanderer along his path.