Josef Luňáček
painting
*1965
Everything has its place. Everything has its time. Our movements are as if led by someone else. I always know exactly which color to choose, how to thin it, where to put it on the canvas. At least a few sentences from a personal testimony of Josef Luňáček. Everything happened in the past three years when excitement and contentment from the paint running down the canvas came together. Even before finishing a painting Josef knew what would be in the next three. Colleagues have compared him to Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). Josef Luňáček had not previously heard about American artist Pollock and his automatistic theory of surrealism. He has now learned and knows that when he is looking at Pollock, it is as if he were looking at himself. The same facial expression, similar gestures, similar technique and similar canvas surfaces. Modesty is and is not appropriate here. They did not know of each other. They met in a different time and in a different place. They are connected through work created with respect and humility. Josef Luňáček is a member of the Union of Visual Artists of Olomouc. He has exhibitions in Olomouc, Prague and Bratislava. His large-scale works decorate the interiors of public buildings, companies, offices, congress halls and hotels. His artwork can be found in private collections.
Josef Pepa Luňáček breaks through the Czech artistic community primarily with his spontaneous engagement, which is based on his distinctive artistic expression. He is a painter who is recognizable and identifiable. Although he does not necessarily sign all of his works, when trying to identify the creator, it is possible to definitively respond – “This is Luňáček”.
The path leading to the painter's artistic expression is built, besides other things, on mastering the art and working with colors on large-scale projects. His restoration experience at the Vlastivědné ('Regional') Museum in Olomouc brought him to ancient techniques all the way from casting artificial marble to previously fashionable tie-dyeing as early as 30 years ago. He also got to know a wide variety of decorative techniques, and especially the behavior of technical colors. The knowledge of color technology allows him to create canvases with a color depth of five, six or more layers while at the same time maintaining the painting’s long-term color stability.
In the last few years, Josef Luňáček went through a personality transformation towards his artistic expression. A craft workshop turned into a studio. He went through a transformation recorded many times in the history of art. From here there were only a few steps to the reception of his exhibitions, an invitation to the Union of Visual Artists of Olomouc and to more exhibitions – the latest one being in Patro Gallery in Olomouc (Opletalova Street), which, in November 2015, will present his first partial collection right in his hometown.
His art is, in all its brevity, characterizable as action abstract expression. At an exhibition of Luňáček's paintings in the Latin Art Gallery in Prague in March of 2015, one of the attending critics assessed Luňáček’s work to be the most extraordinary surprise of abstract expressionism in Czechoslovakia and Czech Republic since the 1960s.
