This and This and Little This

Jiří Kornatovský is a contemporary Czech artist living in Prague who works with drawing, painting and mixed media.
Although this image of Komatovsky’s work is appearing digitized on your computer screen, it’s vital to realize that the real artpiece is a huge drawing that is immensely „physical“. Its corporeality is evident in the dense charcoal traces of „human size“ that constitute the piece. In this way, the artist creates a sort of „anthropology of a drawing“: a human body, physically immanent in its action of „making“. This is a viseral kind of „identity“ – the identity of the human body and its work. Bodies that matter (as important, vital, and as material, matter)…innnumerable movements and countless daily repetitive acts that create the everyday reality of our lives and ourselves. On an explicit level, the image can be read as a symbol: these three cocoons are a visual metaphor for the family, an entity asking to be contemplated.
Kornatovsky explains the work’s context: „This image was created under circumstances of the birth of my child and a has to do with a feeling of responsibility and a need to protect someone which was new to me. It was a shift from huge formats to keeping »things« stable and motionless. And to be ready for an action at the same time. “The topic of the majority of the drawings of Jiří Kornatovský´s represented by just one motif. The shape, the imaginary object. The author depicts it as an isolated element fixed in an empty space, without any connection to the surroundingsor background. (…) The form of the object is usualy spherical, cylindrical, annulated, ovoid. Apparently, he draws from the geometry of round bodies, but he abandons the rigidity of the exact morphology, already in its principle, in favour of the organic imaginativeness.“ Source: Anna Janištinová: Meditation in Drawing. (Catalogue of the exhibition. Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art, National Gallery in Prague, Veletržní palace).