Author :
Jan B. Hurych
Title :
ART-TICKLES
Essay:
Face to Face
FACE TO FACE
(The exhibition of Prof. Jiri Harcuba)
One member of famous Canadian Group of Seven once said that when it comes to painting trees, he preferred the old, weather-beaten ones. When asked why, he explained that they had their own "character" or "personality". I guess it is the same with people if we look at their faces. We are all born as cute little babies, loved and cherished - according to Mark Twain, there is only one most beautiful child in the whole world and every mother has it. Babies with faces blank like a fresh sheet of paper, because there is no history there - yet. As we grow older, life is molding our features and our soul as well. Like a skilled sculptor, it fills our visage with wrinkles and scars, the un-erasable evidence of our passions and pains, the memory bank of our past.
But we can find much more in our faces, too. We all know that there are people who have interesting faces and others who appear - and mostly are - rather dull. We can only wonder what makes some faces more attractive then others, why some fill us with sympathies and others make us shudder. I am not talking about physical beauty or ugliness here, only about that "something" we all can perceive but can hardly understand. If you ask an artist, he would probably talk about different kind of perception or as it is sometimes called, the "inner" beauty.
When we look at portraits of celebrities done by prof. Jiri Harcuba, we can understand that difference without any need for explanation. I can see how - and especially why - he chose his objects: he simply couldn't not to. The temptation was probably too much: those were the faces which had to be captured and kept for posterity. It was also quite challenging, even for a very skilled portraitist such as himself. Their faces had a lot to say and so had he. And he did it, in many places and all around the world - in his exhibitions or as a pedagogue.
It probably took a lot of studies for each portrait - it is not easy to grasp the substance of a complicated person, not in short time, anyway. True, his objects were all famous artists, writers and others who contributed to our cultural heritage; their deeds were well known from their works and their faces from their photographs. But one cannot just use all this in the portrait - not directly, anyway. One can utilize some gentle hints in the background, but only as complements, since the real center of attention was and always will be the face itself. To catch and preserve the personality of the person, one has to be able not only to read the face and thoroughly understand it - he also has to add much more, the artistic touch, the magic, if you will.
Talking about difficulties: the art of portraits has certain rules to follow - mainly, we should be able to recognize that person. Too much stress on individual features could turn it into caricature. Next to those general rules stand other requirements: the individual characteristics, the real insight into personality and how to convert the artist's point of view into his work. And there are also those "little details", which, according to Michelangelo, the perfection must consist of.
Then comes the final problem: the realization of portrait - the form, the content, the style. And choice of material: would it be the medal made of metal or a portrait in clay or maybe a face cut in glass? Glass is of course very difficult material - I know, I know, I said it here before - but it is also an excellent choice: no other material can give a portrait such superb three-dimensional appearance. Needless to say, Prof. Harcuba is an excellent craftsman and quite skilled in all those techniques. Just imagine one of difficulties: the faces cut in glass are actually "negatives", space-wise if you know what I mean. But the results are stunning: they look like they are emerging from somewhere which gives them the touch of extreme reality, but also a mystery no less.
The one question of course is how far can artist go in his attempt to express his understanding of the person. The response can be seen in works of prof. Harcuba: they have the beauty of their own, not only the one for our eyes, but also the "inner one", few steps deeper. Look at those faces and you are immediately struck with uncommon harmony and grace. We can see the artist asked himself the very same question and he also found the answer. Then he turned it into a beautiful piece of art - telling it to us all, literally "face to face".
See the pictures at: http://www.gallery.cz/gallery/en/Vystava/1999_11/index.html
<11>