Art for Good New Life for Exhibitions Zen Seeds by Michal Matzenauer

Zen Seeds by Michal Matzenauer

He goes to the studio beneath the Nusle stairs almost every day; across the yard to a little house just big enough to accommodate an easel, stands for paintings, a couch and a table. Michal Matzenauer keeps a strange diary there. In meditative concentration, he grasps the kernels of that day's experience and then records them in pencil, then acrylic on canvas or hardboard, but most often on paper, sometimes handmade paper, in yellowish, blue or white rolls, which he then cuts as the composition demands. The paintings presented are as similar as one sea wave to another - each is different in the movement of co-creation.

Michal Matzenauer is necessarily influenced by the search for truth in the place he was born (when he was born in Prague's Na Františku Hospital, his parents had him baptized right away, just in case). Moreover, (Zen) Buddhism is close to his heart, as well as the calligraphy of the Arabic masters. He is well aware of our limitations when we are born into a culture other than the one that attracts us, and into which our roots extend very far.

One way to read his daily records is to look for signs and symbols hidden in the graceful curves of his secret writing, which over time becomes increasingly distinctive. A Zen stick, a cross or a pretzel. The elastic shape reminiscent of a Lenten pretzel could symbolise spiritual fulfilment in the prayerful attitude of early Christians, or are the lines of the human body in the lotus flower pose? Michal Matzeanuer himself is alien to such an understanding his own paintings. He paints not riddles, but the tactility of the day of his inner sea.

Someone asked: What is the highest learning? The Master replied: No questions, no answers.
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Michal Matzenauer

20. 11. 1947

Michal Matzenauer was born on November 20, 1947 in Prague, at the Na Františku Hospital, where he was immediately baptized just in case. He spent his youth in Vsetín in Valaška and graduated from secondary chemical engineering in Zlín. From childhood he devoted himself to drawing and began painting at the age of 14. He had begun to devote himself to literature as well. In Zlín, he and his friends published the student literary magazine Plocha, intended for Zlín secondary schools, and which folded upon his departure from Zlín in 1967. In the years 1968-69 he held a number of jobs and roamed Europe with a group of American and European hippies. In 1969, he arranged to study art history at Oxford University in England, but the closure of the border in August 69 did not allow him to travel, and his passport was confiscated. Over the following years, he once again held a number of jobs. In 1972, he landed for a time in a printing house, where he worked as an auxiliary worker and later as a chemist. He was in charge of etching baths for gravure printing and wastewater. He made art prints on printing presses, but this was, of course, outside of working hours. Officially, like many others, he was prevented from exhibiting, publishing, and programs that had already been recorded were banned on the radio. From 1975 to 1990 he worked on drilling and pumping rigs as a worker. In 1977 he signed CHARTER 77 and in 1979 he became a member of VONS. He participated in work in samizdat as an author, as well as in the editing of some periodicals and catalogs, or at the end of normalization, as the editor of the magazine VOKNO. After 1989, he published several collections of poetry and realized a number of independent exhibitions and participated in a number of group exhibitions at home and abroad.

The work of Michal Matzenauer is multi-layered. But there is always an emphasis on the poetic atmosphere in his paintings and drawings. In various periods of his work, writing also appears to him either as part of paintings or directly as a subject. This writing is sometimes legible, even though it is also cryptic, but other times it is not a matter of readability at all, but only of a symbol or a sign - a hint. In these paintings, Matzenauer completely deviates from lettrism or well-known European methods of using writing as pictorial expression. It approaches the meditative practices of depiction that are common in some Eastern cultures, or that are used by some Arab masters. Nevertheless, his effort is to remain compositionally and artistically within European thought and emotion.

O.S.