PARALLEL WORLDS

Petr Volf

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.

Author: Petr Volf
A renowned Czech editor for architecture and art journals, art critic, curator, and author of several publications on art and architecture.