【台北·敦仁】蓝色地平线上 Blue Horizon － 杨・克拉Jan Kaláb 2023全新系列个展 2023.03.11 – 2023.05.28

平行世界
PARALLEL WORLDS

Petr Volf

我们回顾 Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉从创作第一幅涂鸦作品以来的 25 年，我们会看到许多丰富作品，跨越流派界限，并定期寻求新的挑战。他让人头晕目眩，他让人们不自觉地环顾四周。他让人们有一个把头抬起来的理由，因为他在公寓二楼的窗台上放了一个小雕像，或是让人们悄悄检查一下他们正在行走的人行道，因为他把它变成了一幅巨大的水平画作。一旦人们注意到，他们就会小心翼翼地行走，就像走在禅宗花园的鹅卵石上。通过他的艺术实践，Kaláb 打破了公共空间一贯的单调乏味。

艺术评论家通常难以找到一个词来形容 Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉。他们在称他为涂鸦作家、雕塑家、壁画家或画家之间犹豫不决。这些标籤中的每一个都是正确的，但同时又不精确。他同时进行了上述所有的事情，并同时启动了所有活动；它们相互重叠并相互影响。有时，我们彷彿在见证整体艺术的运作 —— 将各种学科结合成一个有凝聚力的整体，一切突然以惊人的形式发挥作用。

从 Kaláb 克拉决定在夜幕降临后带著喷雾罐去伏尔塔瓦河上的康帕岛的那一刻起，他就是一名艺术家。十五岁时，他不仅发现了自己的艺术，也发现了自己生命的意义。他显然很有天赋，涂鸦爱好者们一直在追踪 Cakes 在布拉格牆上创作的作品，他们认为这些作品在很多方面都是一种启示。Kaláb 克拉的做法改变了公众的看法，「喷雾器 」(sprayers) 只不过是普通的破坏者，他们最关心的是提升自己过度膨胀的自负。他成功地与当局谈判，设置了合法的围牆，寻找最适合他精心设计的大型建筑的地点。他还开始在他的一些作品中放入文本内容，对他周围的世界发表评论，主要是在 Těšnov 特什诺夫的牆上 —— 现今我们会说它们就像在更新状态。即使多年之后，看著现今可以被视为具有历史意义的照片，仍然会让人觉得很有趣。他所写的观点是事实，也充满了自我讽刺。他不是无缘无故的反叛者。他只是想让人们看到 —— 并想画画。他痴迷于艺术创作，彷彿有人对他耳语说：『 只有在别人无所事事的时候努力工作，才能成为大师级的艺术家』，他在最短的时间内为一个目标投入了无数个小时。捷径是不存在的，尤其是当街道是你工作的地方，而你唯一可以依赖的就是你的别名时 ——只有少数内部人士知道你是它的真正持有者。他对每一件新作品都进行了改进，到二十世纪末，他已经製作了超过一千件的作品。他仔细地记录了他所做的一切，并不是出于虚荣心，而是通过回顾性地检查照片来检视每件作品的执行与质量。除了他的家乡布拉格，Cakes 几乎遍布整个欧洲的牆壁或火车上：维也纳、柏林、汉堡、苏黎世、巴黎、罗马、米兰、巴塞罗那和伦敦，以及大西洋彼岸的纽约，世界艺术之都，1960 年代和 70 年代之交涂鸦的诞生地，这也是他作为一位涂鸦艺术家的决心及经历严峻考验的地方，包括直接面对严厉惩罚与威胁，例如市长 Rudy Giuliani 鲁迪·朱利安尼无情地僱用他清理城市街道一样。

2000 年左右，他开始使用 Cakes 之外的另一个暱称，成为 Point。这是一个突破性的时刻。在千禧年之初，Point 带来了一场变革，使 Kaláb 克拉在全球成为街头艺术家中的翘楚。他成为第一个离开牆壁并在三维上进行涂鸦的人 —— 雕塑和物体，介于空间装置、雕塑和建筑之间，并在众多国际博览会上获得成功。杨・克拉 Jan Kaláb 是很真诚的，对于一个艺术家来说，这是一个基本的前提。这与他的固执和坚韧有很大关係；他试图自己寻找解决方法，不愿意随波逐流—— 他想成为引领潮流的人！他是一名自学者，这使他成为了独一无二的艺术家。虽然他在艺术学校学习，但主要是想为自己遇到的创作问题去寻找解决方案，而不是让任何事情都只听命于自己。他最初就读于一所以艺术为重点的高中，随后申请在Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze 布拉格艺术、建筑与设计学院  ，简称 VŠUP ，学习建筑，后来转到学校的雕塑工作室。每一步，他都很快的意识到过于严格的教学形式不是他喜欢的。

出于同样的原因，他转学到捷克最重要的艺术学校，Akademie výtvarného umění v Praze 布拉格美术学院，简称 AVU。在 AVU，他终于获得了梦寐以求的自由。 吉特卡·斯沃博多娃 Jitka Svobodová 教授看到了他的潜力，并没有强迫他去做任何不适合他的事情。他于 2006 年以优异的成绩毕业。他的的论文标题为 Tady je tam (Here is There) ，致力于讨论涂鸦现象，将其呈现为一种延伸到许多其他艺术学科的流派。他将布拉格变成了他自己的露天画廊，并运用了相机和时间元素。论文的评价包括以下内容：『他是这个国家唯一一位成功地将这一边缘艺术学科提升到独特形式水平的艺术家，同时又不放弃他的初衷，包括使用刻字、他的签名（ Cakes 或 Point ） ，使用形式、颜色、对比度以及其他属性。』在他的案例中，没有什麽可挑剔的。

论文审查委员会的成员对他所呈现作品的数量和质量都感到惊讶，其中也有一些人承认这是他们第一次见到涂鸦艺术家。论文答辩在Veletržní palác 贸易展览馆进行，这裡收藏著国家美术馆的当代艺术藏品，在一定程度上履行了传教的作用，象徵著将当前的艺术能量注入已经僵化的机构。 Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉成为历史上第一位获得布拉格美术学院硕士学位的涂鸦艺术家。彷彿他在证明他曾经写在离布拉格城堡不远的乔特克弯下的牆上的话：『如果我想做某事，我不会问我是否能做到……』

下一个决定性的时刻是他在布拉格Vysočany 维索常尼的一个前变电站中获得了一间工作室。他不再需要在外面的街上工作，也不再需要查看天气预报来担心会不会下雨。随著地点的改变，他也改变了他的艺术媒介。就好像地点决定了接下来会发生什麽事情。从 2007 年开始，他在画布上创作了不特定于某个特定位置的绘画，不考虑由框架限定的表面。他用刷子和丙烯颜料换掉了他在製作大件作品时也会用到的喷雾罐和滚筒。他必须掌握这项技术，他花了几个月的时间才获得自信，让他能够捕捉到自己的幻觉。从主题上讲，他从上次中断的地方继续；他在画布上绘製了他的别名 Point，逐渐将其简化为空间中的几何元素。走上合法的艺术道路，他研究了自己实践的本质，分析和诠释了迄今为止他作品中最强大的方面。2008年，他刚完成画家的转型，就在 Trafo 画廊举办了他的第一次个展——同时庆祝了他的三十岁生日。它获得了极好的评价。艺术评论家和策展人 Jiří Machalický 伊日·马查利基在 Lidové noviny 《人民报》上的评论中不遗馀力地讚美：『他的画作完美地考虑了构图，汲取了两次世界大战期间建构主义的线索，Mondrian蒙德里安或Doesburg杜斯伯格的抽象。艺术家的画作自由而充满活力，也体现了对颜色关係的微妙感觉。』这个有趣的“现象”也被艺术理论家 Karel Srp 卡雷尔先生在他的文章 Visuté roviny《悬浮平面》中记录下来，该文章发表在 Kaláb 克拉在 Trafo 画廊的第二次个展（2011 年）的目录中。在那时，这位艺术家已经磨练了他早期的绘画能力，使它们更加精确，并将它们发展和提升到一个更高的水平。Srp 还认为 Kaláb 克拉的艺术方向与上个世纪初活跃的抽象艺术先驱有相似之处，在他看来，『 一方面由完全相交的平面構成的純幾何空間，另一方面是擺脫了依賴重力的宇宙空間…… 』他觀察到 Kaláb 克拉沿著他自己的軌跡到達了這一點，而不是採用已經存在的藝術詞彙。此外，他提請注意藝術家未來發展的另一個值得注意的方面：『Kaláb克拉從幾個基本的先決條件中構建他的視覺世界，以兩種對比鮮明的形式為代表——球體和立方體，圓形和正方形。這些已成為他進一步發展的資源。』無限空間中的幾何體，或穿透繪畫的多個層次，現在是他創作其作品決定性的基礎。除了鞏固他的藝術簽名外，第二個展覽的重要性在於這位 30 歲的藝術家首次以他的名字 Jan Kaláb 楊・克拉出現。

2013 年， Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉在The Chemistry Gallery 化学画廊的个展「 Děravé plány 备用计画」的目录介绍中包含了他对自己提出的几个具有哲学倾向的问题：『我经常问自己，一个人是否可以耗尽灵感？我能到达无法继续的地步吗？到底有没有终点存在？ 他的回答是没有尽头，到达的每一点都是通往另一个世界的另一扇门——我们越接近它，它就越开始包围我们。突然之间，我们身处其中』他解释道，『我们开始在新的地平线上看到更多的点。一旦一个人开始了这样的朝圣之旅，他们肯定在一生中都会充满乐趣。事实上， 有时你看不到一颗星星，因为它们被云遮住了，但这并不意味著它们不在远处。』不久之后，他通过了另一个门户；他开始画圆形和有机形成的画，证实了他对艺术有无限可能性的信念。巧合的是，他选择在纽约冒险一试，他说纽约是最充满活力的城市； 令人不安，但却促使一个人去做令人信服的工作。 多年前，当他在那裡装饰地铁时，世界贸易中心的双子塔还屹立不倒。 这一次，他在布鲁克林有一个工作室，在那裡，他可以平静地创作反映这座充满活力的大都市氛围的抽象作品。他得到了不同的理解：『他的极简主义几何画夸张、色彩丰富、充满活力，唤起了他最近在纽约的经历，温暖、声音和兴奋的体验』、『看到他的画就是见证纽约市在任何特定时刻存在的孤独、色彩、短暂和力量的深度。』纽约策展人 Alan Ket 艾伦凯特写道。 

与此同时，他成功地在奥斯特拉瓦、布拉格、波哥大和伦敦绘製了巨大的壁画，在街头艺术展览中构建了三维的作品，提出了球形雕塑的概念，以及在画布上绘画——每一次的创作都再衍伸出另一个系列。Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉不断前行，抹去了伟大艺术与次要艺术之间的差异，抹去了街头艺术、涂鸦艺术与画廊艺术之间的差异，以同样的参与度去做每件事，因为他知道没有它，他就无法打开让他看到了宇宙繁星的大门。没有人两次踏入同一条河流。通过他的实践，Jan Kaláb 杨・克拉是 Heraclitus 赫拉克利特对时间的理解的化身。他掌握了一个重要的真理，意识到重複成功的事情会导致停滞不前。没有人知道他下一秒会做什麽。他自己可能都不知道。然而，我们不仅可以希望，而且可以肯定，它将会是一个惊喜。

Petr Volf
捷克著名建筑与艺术期刊资深编辑，艺评家，策展人，出版多本艺术与建筑专书著作

PARALLEL WORLDS

If we look back on the twenty-five years that have elapsed since Jan Kaláb made his first graffiti piece, we see a surprisingly rich body of work cutting across genre boundaries and seeking new challenges at regular intervals. He makes people’s heads spin. He forces them to look around unwittingly. He gives them a reason to raise their eyes because he’s placed a little statue on the ledge of the second floor of an apartment building, or to fleetingly check the sidewalk they’re walking on because he’s transformed it into a huge, horizontal painting. As soon as they notice, they tread carefully,as if walking on the pebbles of a Zen garden. With his artistic practice, Kaláb undermines the customary drabness of public space.

Art critics often have a problem finding one word to characterize Jan Kaláb. They hesitate between calling him a graffiti writer, sculptor, muralist or painter. Each of these labels is correct, yet at the same time imprecise, being a simplification: He does all of the above concurrently, setting all his activities into motion at the same time; they overlap and influence each other.Sometimes it’s as if we were witnessing Gesamtkunstwerk in action – the combining of various disciplines into one cohesive whole, where everything suddenly functions in a striking synthesis.

Kaláb has been an artist since the moment he decided to go to Kampa Island on the Vltava River with a spray can after nightfall. At the age of fifteen he discovered not only his art, but the meaning of his life. He was evidently talented and graffiti aficionados who kept track of the pieces produced on Prague’s walls by Cakes, as he called himself at the time, thought they were in many ways a revelation. Kaláb’s practice helped change the public’s view that “sprayers” were nothing but ordinary vandals, their primary concern being to boost their own overinflated egos. He had successful negotiations with the authorities to set aside legal walls, looking for appropriate locations that would best suit his large, carefully composed forms. He also started inserting textual content into some of his pieces, making comments on the world around him, primarily on the wall in Těšnov- today we’d say they were something akin to status updates.Even after so many years, looking at photographs that could now be considered historic, it makes for interesting reading. His written views are engaged in the true sense of the word, as well as being full of self-irony. He was not a rebel without a cause. He simply wanted to be seen – and to paint. He was obsessed with making art, as if someone had whispered to him that a person can only become a master artist if they work when others are twiddling their thumbs. He devoted tens of thousands of hours to a single objective within the shortest timeframe. Shortcuts do not exist, especially if the street is where you do your work and the only thing you can depend on is your alias – and only a few insiders know that you are its true holder. He improved with each new piece and by the end of the twentieth century he’d made far in excess of a thousand.He carefully documented everything he did: He didn’t do this purely out of vanity, retrospectively he checked the quality of execution of each piece by examining the photographs. Besides his home city Prague, Cakes could be found on walls or trains practically all over Europe: Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Zurich, Paris, Rome, Milan, Barcelona and London, as well as on the other side of the Atlantic in New York, the art capital of the world, where graffiti was born at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s. That’s also where his resolve as a graffiti artist went through its acid test, including direct confrontation with the threat of harsh penalties, as mercilessly employed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani to clean up the city’s streets.

Around 2000, he started using another nickname besides Cakes, becoming Point. It was a ground­ – breaking moment. At the beginning of the new millennium, Point brought a change that moved Kaláb to the forefront of progressive street artists within a global context.He became one of the first to leave the wall behind and make graffiti in three dimensions – sculptures and objects on the boundary between spatial installation, sculpture and architecture, which went on to reap successes at numerous international expositions.Jan Kaláb is genuine. That’s a fundamental prerequisite for an artist who doesn’t intend to follow the mainstream. It has a lot to do with his obstinacy and tenacity: He tries to find solutions to everything himself and is unwilling to follow the reigning trends – he wants to be the one setting them! He is effectively an autodidact, allowing him to be a one-of-a-kind art innovator. Although he studied at art schools, it was primarily to try to find solutions to his own creative issues, rather than to let anything be dictated to him. He initially attended an art-focused high school, subsequently applying to study at the Vysoká škola uměleckoprůmyslová v Praze, or VŠUP (Art, Architecture and Design School in Prague), where he studied architecture, later transferring to the school’s sculpture studio. At each step, he quickly realized that an excessively strict form of tuition wasn’t to his liking.

For the same reason, he transferred to the Akademie výtvarného umění v Praze, or AVU (Academy of Fine Arts in Prague), the most important art school in the Czech Republic.At AVU he finally gained the freedom he’d been dreaming about. Professor Jitka Svobodová recognized his potential and didn’t push him into anything that didn’t fit his focus. He graduated in 2006 with an excellent degree. His entire dissertation entitled Tady je tam (Here is There) was devoted to the graffiti phenomenon, presenting it as a genre extending across many other art disciplines. He transformed Prague into his own open-air gallery, as well as putting into play cameras and the element of time.The appraisal included the following: “He is the only artist in this country who managed to elevate this marginal art discipline to the level of distinctive forms, without relinquishing his basic starting points, including the use of lettering, his signature (Cakes or Point), work with form, color, its contrasts, as well as other attributes.” In his case, there was nothing to find fault with.

Members of the examination committee were surprised by the unprecedented quantity and quality of the work presented, some admitted that it was the first time they’d met a graffiti artist in the flesh. The dissertation defense took place in Veletržní palác (Trade Fair Palace), which houses the National Gallery’s collection of modern and contemporary art, and in part fulfilled a missionary function,symbolizing the injection of current art energy into somewhat of a fossilized institution.Jan Kaláb became the first graffiti artist in history to receive a master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. As if he was proving the words he’d once written on the wall under Chotek’s Bend, not far away from Prague Castle: “If I want to do something, I don’t ask if I can do it…”

The next defining moment came when he acquired a studio in a former electrical substation in Prague’s Vysočany. He no longer had to work outside on the street, checking the weather reports, worrying about whether it would rain.With the change of location, he also transformed his art medium. As if the location determined what was going to happen next. From 2007 onwards, he made paintings on canvas not specific to a particular location, discounting the surface delimited by the frame. He swapped his spray cans and rollers, which he also used when making larger pieces, for brushes and acrylic paints. He had to master the technique, and it took months before he acquired the self-assurance that would allow him to capture his visions. Thematically he continued where he’d left off: He painted his alias Point on canvas, progressively simplifying it into geometrical elements in space. Taking a legitimate artistic path, he investigated the essence of his practice, analyzing and interpreting the strongest aspects of his work so far.

In 2008, as soon as his transformation as a painter was complete, he held his first solo exhibition in the Trafo Gallery – also celebrating his thirtieth birthday.It received excellent reviews. Art critic and curator Jiří Machalický spared no superlatives in his review in the Lidové noviny newspaper: “His paintings have perfectly considered compositions, picking up the threads of interwar constructivism, the abstractions of Mondrian or Doesburg. Free and dynamic, the artist’s paintings also manifest a subtle sense for color relations.”

This interesting “phenomenon” was also pointed out by art theorist Karel Srp in his text Visuté roviny (Suspended Planes), published in the catalog accompanying Kaláb ‘s second solo exhibition in Trafo Gallery (2011). By then the artist had honed his earlier endeavors in painting, making them more precise and developing and elevating them to an even higher level. Srp also felt that Kaláb ‘s artistic direction had an affinity with the pioneers of abstract art active at the start of the previous century, who in his view had come up with “pure geometrical space constructed from stark intersecting planes on the one hand, and cosmogenic space, liberated from dependence on gravity, on the other…” He observed that Kaláb arrived at this point along his own trajectory, rather than by adopting an already existing artistic vocabulary.Additionally, he drew attention to another noteworthy aspect of the artist’s future development: ” Kaláb constructs his visual world from several fundamental prerequisites, represented by two contrasting forms – the sphere and the cube, the circle and the square. These have become resources for his further development.” Geometrical bodies in an infinite space, or penetrating several layers of the painting, are now the determining building blocks from which he composes his work. Besides consolidating his artistic signature, the second exhibition was also important in that the thirty-year-old artist presented himself for the first time under his civilian name Jan Kaláb. That was to be the case from then on.

In 2013, Jan Kaláb ‘s introduction to the catalog of his solo exhibition Děravé plány (Alternate Plan(e)s) in the Chemistry Gallery included several philosophically inclined questions that he posed to himself: “I often ask myself whether one can exhaust inspiration. Can I reach a point where I can’t continue? Does any kind of end point exist at all?” His answer was that there is no end, and each point one reaches is another gateway to yet another world – the closer we approach it, the more it begins to encompass us. “Suddenly we are inside it,” he explains, “and we begin to see more points on the new horizon. Once a person sets out on a pilgrimage like that, they’re guaranteed to have fun throughout their lives. And the fact that sometimes you can’t see a single star because they’re obscured by clouds, doesn’t mean they’re not there in the distance.” A short while later, he passed through another portal: He started painting circular and organically formed paintings, confirming his stated belief in the infinity of artistic possibilities.By coincidence he took the plunge in New York, which he talks about as the most energetically charged city; unnerving, yet urging a person to do compelling work. Years before, when he was there adorning subway trains, the twin towers of the World Trade Center were still standing. This time round he had a studio in Brooklyn where he had peace and calm to make abstract works reflecting the atmosphere of the pulsating metropolis.He found understanding: “His minimalist geometric paintings are bombastic, colorful, and energetic, evoking the warmth, sounds and excitement that have been his recent experience in New York,” wrote New York curator Alan Ket. “To see his paintings is to witness the depth of loneliness, color, transience, and power that exists in New York City at any given moment.”

At the same time, he managed to paint huge murals in Ostrava, Prague, Bogota and London, construct three-dimensional Point pieces at street art exhibitions, come up with the concept of spherical sculptures, as well as painting on canvas – one activity generated another. Jan Kaláb is constantly on the move, wiping away the differences between great and minor art, between the milieus of street, graffiti and gallery art, doing everything with the same degree of engagement because he knows that without it he couldn’t open the doors that allow him to see the stars in the Universe. No one steps in the same river twice. With his practice, Jan Kaláb is the personification of Heraclitus’ understanding of time. He has grasped an important truth, realizing that repeating something successful leads to stagnation. No one knows what he will do in the next moment. He may not even know it himself. However, we can not only hope, but we can be sure, that it will come as a surprise.