Czech Informel is described as a current of expressive structural abstraction that emerged from specific local conditions at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s.Nešlehová M, 1997, pp. 21-22 It radically defined itself against all contemporary production and compromised creation and aestheticization of official art and became a turning point in the history of Czech art.Jan Kříž, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, p. 64 Foreign critics appreciated the uniqueness of the worksPierre Restany, Notes de voyage, Cimaise VIII, 1961, art. 51, pp. 75-80 and wrote about a strong revolt of about thirty desperate avant-garde artists, which had no predecessor in Czechoslovakia.Dora Ashton, 1962, cit. Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, p. 65 The term "informel" was used from 1945 by the French critic Waldemar-George and taken up and claimed by the painter Michel Tapié in the very title of the exhibition Signifiants de l´informel staged in Paul Facchetti´s studio in 1951. Bertrand Schmitt, in: František Dryje, Bertrand Schmitt (eds.), 2012, p. 102 With international informel, which in Enrico Crispolti's conception includes a very heterogeneous group of artistic forms ranging from tachism to lyrical abstraction,Crispolti Enrico, L'Informale Storia e poetica, Carucci, Assisi-Roma, 1971 is the Czech informel related only by some creative techniques.
Definition of the term The term "Czech Informel" was an afterthought and was defined only in the context of the 1991 exhibition and accompanying symposium.Informel. Proceedings of the symposium, Academy of Fine Arts, Prague 1991 In the 1960s, the term structural abstraction was used, which according to Mahulena Nešlehová is inaccurate and misleading, because the term structure refers rather to an order that is internally organized. Informel, on the other hand, works with chance and the projection of spontaneous emotions and represents an "expressive material antipainting". It is not a gestural work, because in addition to striving for a strong expression embedded in the final shape of the finished work, one of the quality criteria was the perfect processing of material structures and the cultivation of artistic means.Nešlehová M, 1997, p. 141 The striving for a definitive, finished and closed form of the work, which is seemingly in contrast to the openness and immediacy of the process of creation, has its background in cultural tradition and represents a specific characteristic of Czech works with features of the "national school".Nešlehová M, in: P. Spielmann (ed.), 1998 The finely articulated structure mirrors the complexity of the artist's psyche and the spiritual and ethical content of the work. In the post-war situation, the ostentatious destruction of the figure means at the same time its re-statement or even sacralization, the injured material becomes a metaphor of wounded humanity and a ritual body marked by stigmata.Jana and Jiří Ševčík, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 48-52 With the passage of time, informel appears to be an adequate artistic expression of the state of thought and consciousness of man in the post-war and so-called Cold War era, burdened with existential and subjective issues.
A typical common feature of the informel works was the need to break the boundary between painting and sculpture (relief) and the destruction of the conventions of form, the use of all means to physically objectify the inner feeling and to encode, record and petrify it, exploring the expressive possibilities of matter and image composition from disparate materials that expand into space and are taken out of their usual context or denied their usual function. The role of meaning is attributed to the void that surrounds the core. The process of creation itself involved the exposure of matter as well as its concealment and encryption into complex systems of shape and semantics, and evoked an escalation of emotion through the composition of materials.Aleš Veselý, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 22-25 In the lengthy process of creation, the matter of the painting was touched, kneaded and destroyed, assemblages of different materials were layered, burned, disintegrated and rejoined, taking the form of almost magical artefacts with features of a certain "baroqueness". Found objects marked by time and human use, synthetic varnishes, sand, nails, wires, strings, sheets, rags, asphalt, pieces of wood served as materials used to create informel works. Important at the time was the newly produced and difficult to find synthetic material acronex (polyvinyl acetate, an artificially softened resin), which allowed the joining of disparate materials and the creation of high relief structures.Interview of R. Wagner with Zdeněk Beran, 2015
From a similar European production,Tate Gallery: Art Informel which built on the aesthetic effect of raw materials and structures and lost intrinsic credibility through repetition,Jan Kříž, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, p. 68 Czech Informel differed in emphasis on its existential basis. The principle of the permanent construction and destruction of the image was a reaction to the severity of the times and an attempt to penetrate to the deeper essence of creation, in which the birth involves at the same time the extinction of the previous and reflects the consciousness of the fragility of human existence itself. The hidden trace of the stories of their creators, living on the fringe of society, is imprinted on the artwork.Věra Jirousová, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 32-34 The expression of the creative motion of thought was not abstract construction, but a direct contact with matter and through it with the earth.Dalibor Veselý, in: Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 29-31 In the atmosphere of totalitarian dictatorship, with its vulgar propagandistic optimism, a sensitive person had to react only with total negation. Czech material expression, as a mystical version of symbolic self-torture, offers a glimpse into the gullet of death and the void. According to art historian Jan Kříž, in the Czech case it was expressionism inverted inwardsJan Kříž, in: Nešlehová M, 1997, p. 260 and the threshold through which one entered the world of absolute independence and freedom was death. In pathological times, extreme revolt in art was paid for by the weakening of the practical will to live,Jan Kříž, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 26-28 as evidenced by the untimely deaths of Antonín Tomalík (1939-1968) and Vladimír Boudník (1924-1968) and the unfortunate death of Jiří Balcar (1929-1968). According to Ševčík, the magical creation of objects and the rituals associated with it, the movement towards transcendence and aesthetic cultivation are, on the contrary, a rescue from tragedy and a return to the certainty of a higher spiritual order - that is, rather a feedback to life.
As a symbol of coming to terms with an alienated world, a work of art may represent a revival of myth-making archetypes or an active gesture that objectifies and manifests a personal mental model. For the content of the message in a non-figurative expression, which lacks the presence of sensory visual elements, the carrier of the message of meaning (or the record of the artist's mental state) becomes a system of symbols and signs that cannot be directly deciphered, but can only be grasped sensually and unconsciously.Dalibor Veselý, in: Nešlehová M, 1997, p. 261 The very moment of the completion of the work also represents for the artist the conclusion of the process of identification, which cannot be repeated or interpreted.Aleš Veselý, Graphics, drawings, catalogue of the OG Liberec exhibition, 1965 The artwork as an image-object enriches the objective and spiritual reality of the world with a phenomenon that disturbs with its rationally ungraspable existence and stimulates the viewer to search for meaning and significance. It has a special magical attraction that does not allow us to pass it by unobserved and not to remain affected by it.František Šmejkal, in: Nešlehová M, 1997, p. 258 The works of Czech Informel are close to each other in their heavy monochrome uncolouring and rigorous conception of the expressive material structures.
The artistic expression, referred to as "Czech informel", concentrates the essential features of Czech art in both a positive and negative sense. According to Milan Knížák, it has a parallel with Czech art of the second half of the 19th century in the degree of pathos, accentuated literariness and a kind of strange "material" patriotism.Milan Knížák, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 13-14
Photographic informel Non-figurative photographs depicting formlessness, randomness, disorganization, when by getting close to the object and inside its frame the photographer deliberately cancels the context and the possibility of orientation, can be considered as a precursor of painting and sculpture informel. The more concretely the matter is depicted, the more it becomes abstract and similar to the non-figurative textures of paintings. Walls are a frequent subject of photography, offering a parallel between totalitarian regimes and prisons. Surrealist origins are intertwined with existentialism in the central theme of death - in the subjects of tombstones, stelae, burnt holes, in the setting of junkyards and graveyards of things. The oscillation between inward penetration and reverse pressure is manifested by a focus on the layering and peeling of the surface of matter, the cracks, crevices, bulges and protrusions. The aesthetics of banality, which in its most radical position depicts indifferent nothingness as an aesthetic object, has its origins in surrealism. The humanistically binding and morally imperative message of Informel, which was born out of feelings of anxiety and threat, is the courage to face a difficult social situation and to take even considerable personal risks. Among other things, existentialism was a defense of individualism against the state's dictate to collectivism.Antonín Dufek, in: Informel. Proceedings of the Symposium, 1991, pp. 44-47
Another direction of photographic informel is represented by experiments with photographic emulsion, which create completely artificial textures. This is the case, for example, of Miloš Koreček's fokalks and some works by Miroslav Hák, Čestmír Janošek or Běla Kolářová.
History In the history of Czech art one can hardly find a phenomenon, similar to the emergence of an authentic Czech structural abstraction movement at the turn of 1959 and 1960. This current, with its artistic and moral consistency, created a certain point of ultimate radicalism that Czech art lacked before.