Pavel Holeka

GIRL’S DREAMS and other collages

GALERIE FELIX FIGURA
Všehrdova 19, Praha 1 – Malá Strana, www.felix-figura.cz
Open 22 October – 8 November 2009, Tuesday – Sunday 2 p.m. – 7 p.m. The author will be present.
Contact: pavelholeka@seznam.cz, tel. 775 405 338

Pavel Holeka (1945, Dvůr Králové nad Labem), a poet and a collagist, lives in Prague – Hodkovičky and with his wife Marta has two children. In the years 1970–1992 he worked as a clerk  in Technomat Praha, since 1992 he has fully devoted his time to creative art work.
He has had many one man shows, e.g. in the Gallery of Fine Arts in Náchod, in the Central Europe Gallery and publishing house in Prague, in the Gallery at the White Unicorn in Klatovy, in the Prague Congress Centre, or in the Krause Gallery in Switzerland and the London Bible College. He has taken part in a number of collective exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Currently, he mostly takes part in the exhibitions of Umělecká beseda [Art Association] (Mánes Gallery in Prague etc.).
He has also designed a number of book covers and posters. He has published his poems in e.g. Život review of the Umělecká beseda. In 2009 he is to publish a book of 22 collages and meditative texts with the Erbor Vitae publishing house Mezi dvěma světy (Hebrejská abeceda) [Between Two Worlds (Hebrew Alphabet)]. Mostly, Holeka creates his collages in cycles, such as the Scores, Poems, Inner Spaces, Torn-out poems, Remembrances of Childhood, Chassidic Songs and Tales, Abstract Poems, Imaginative Portraits or Girls´ Dreams.
Pavel Holeka is a member of various Czech and foreign artists associations, such as Umělecká beseda, SCA, Christian Artists Europe, SIAC and Traditional Media Unit-ICMC. His works are part of both private and public collections, e.g. Pražská plynárenská, a. s. (Czech Collages Collection), Klenová District Gallery in Klatovy, LBC London, SEA Zürich and Konos Connection in the United States.

Pavel Holeka cuts out pieces of printed material and uses them like words – he does not change them at all, but brings them together in syntactic relationships, just as though he were writing poems in words. His tools are scissors, tweezers, brush and paste. He works with them neatly and with precision, knowing the laws of beauty, as he himself put it. Because of their typografical neatness his collages would fit well into a book. He brings together paper figures, animals, objects, together with letters, numerals, fragments of writing and musical notation, in order to give them “new life” and to express himself as a poet through them.
Eva Petrová

The fact that Holeka´s collages have been orientated vertically is significant as a move up or down often along diagonal lines plays an important role in a symbolic sense. Space is not revealed openly but only indicated bearing an abstract character. A certain reality is indicated by figurative elements – figures or things, as they have brought a new prospective depth from their former life which helps us to see the inside of the space. We could describe the prospective depth as a weight which is connected to the real picture and speaks about not only the earthly being. It contrasts with lightness and uplifting reserved for the spiritual world and is often expressed by geometric and textual elements substituting sound or music in Holeka´s collages.
Marcel Fišer

Holeka´s expression is delicate, lightweight, as if touching only. By fragments, it is sometimes possible to express more than by composed complicated constructions. His collages are natural and simple, and yet at the same time, they have a very precise and sophisticated structure. Their layers of meaning overlap and we have to observe them very closely in order to be able to gradually uncover their various messages.
Jiří Machalický