VISUAL ART PROJECTS-THE PILGRIMAGE PROJECT

The Wandering Project started in 1999 by the exhibition in Stromovka park in Prague. A group of sixteen objects distributed in the various locations of the large park marked up the way - the wandering - through the Stromovka park. In 2000 the whole project was rebuilt on the bulwarks and in the cellars of the East Bohemian Gallery in Pardubice: all in all twelve objects in the grounds of the Pardubice Castle. In that same year the project was also displayed in the synagogue in Hranice na Moravě and at the Sovinec Castle.

In 2001 the project continued in Kroměříž: fifteen objects were placed in the Platan Grove in Podzámecká zahrada (Chateau Garden), in the vestibule and in the entrance hall of Muzeum Kroměřížska ( Museum of Kroměříž Region) and in the greenhouse in Květná zahrada (Flower Garden)
Each time the exhibition is composed in a different, original way suiting the location and it always presents some new objects created specifically for that very occasion, while the older objects are used in a different way, in a different exposure and context than at the earlier exhibitions.

Jiří Zemánek: about Wandering project
With his sculptures Miloslav Fekar brings the specific shape of local sculptor's post-minimalism into existence, the crucial impulse of which has been presented during the second half of 1980's in the creative work of Jan Ambrůz. Characteristic in this respect is the combination of sculptors art with the nature, a feature which also for M. Fekar has become a unique approach to the "seited sculpture", manifesting itself in structures, sometimes highly variable, and reflecting places in which these structures can hardly deny their relationship to the earthiness and which stress the hand-made features of the work, put together mainly from wood and featuring the carpenter's design. Last but not least this makes a reference to a geometry with a specific archetypal symbolic forms, linked mostly with some architectural motives such as the column, the temple, arbour, the gate etc. in which the human need for order between earth and the heaven is manifested.
The relationship between sculpture and the free nature, and also the urban area, has been developed by Miloslav Fekar to an original and highly specific proper concept of sculpture, dealing mainly and in a systematic way with the constitution of living environment. In this respect Miloslav Fekar succeeded to establish creative links between invention and the sensitivity that are necessary for a genius loci of a particular place to live. Miloslav Fekar's interest is not limited to sculpture as only a peculiar and in itself absorbed monument, but rather to a sort of varying structures in a room responding in a prompt and highly sensitive way to the environment, providing for further development of a dialog in such an environment, with episodes picturing its specific features or giving rise to sightseeings in which it becomes worth to make a stop and to observe the nature. Two features become significant in this respect, in particular the variability already mentioned that gives the work a shape of building block scheme, and the natural overlap into architecture and design. This, however, does not deal with applied art but produces always highly original works with non-decorative values (such as the "bridge sculpture" erected at Stromovka garden in Prague). The sculptures as such are conceived by the author as the linking elements of a chain of installations, with interrelationship between the, in which the specific and unique environment is modelled as a "way" i.e. an "episode".

Based on this principle Miloslav Fekar started to make public his exhibitions, named by himself as a "Wandering". First of them took place in 1999 in the Prague fair-ground Stromovka, and continued the following year in the town of Hranice na Moravě (in the area of Jewish synagogue and the castle) and in the mounds area of the Pardubice castle. This year's "Wandering Project" has been installed in Kromeriz, as a link between the Under-Castle Garden area and the downtown city of Kromeriz (the city museum), and the city's Flower Garden (greenhouse). The artist is attempted to continuously enrich the "wandering" composition of sculptures with new elements, originating as a reaction on the new area and seeking to generate a persistently new mood and to establish the atmosphere of the local genius loci. Within the local natural environment Miloslav Fekar approaches some sort of personified sculptural "land art", in which we may perceive the background of other "earthiness" kind of artist like Richard Long or the minimalist-style of Carl André. The Fekars's contribution consists in the establishing of links and the inter-communication of the civilized country with architectural and urban area filled with housing estates, in which the main area of activities becomes the environment of a garden or a park. On the Fekar's exhibition in Kromeriz it will be interesting, for sure, to follow the reaction of the geometry-shaped sculptures in contrast with the ornamental formations of the flower bed style of the Flower Garden greenhouse, or the architectonic milieu of the historical town, or the relationship of the organically-shaped sculptures of wooden shells with the crowns of the plane trees growing in the Under-Castle garden.

The sense of geometrical (rational) and organic (natural) polarity thus becomes another significant feature of the performance of this artist. Whereas it is by using the minimalistic geometry language which brings Miloslav Fekar to a synoptical and articulated area of the nature, in this way manifesting the human capability to recreate and adapt the environment the man lives in, his sculptures of shells, freely suspended into the tree crowns testify of rather opposite tendency, that is to say the Fekar's embryonic, physical and biophil predilection. His "shells" draw our attention to the secrecy of disguised life of the trees and generally of all embryoes and germs of which the wealth of the natural world is constituted, pointing to the unity of all living bodies and the "sacred circle of creation" (mandala). At the same time it draws our attention upwards from the ground to the crowns of trees, to the air, to a free flow of wind energy that flows and moves them and, in some cases, transforms them into a kind of improvised music instruments.

The sculptural work of Miloslav Fekar is related indisputedly with a highly actual issue of today, i.e. with the seek of that human culture the nature is to become integral part of which. From the point of view of technocratic based modern civilization this tendency may appear as an effort to naturalize sometimes the intolerant and purpose-based environment of our housing estates. In its entity, however, it relates to a tendency addressing the abandon of separation between the town and the country, the civilization and the nature. We presume that they may be linked together. Thus the theme of garden and a park becomes a challenge for artists of today, which by all means should not be crossed out. In my opinion it does include an encoded model (hologram) of the new way of life we are looking for.


Jiří Zemánek
25.4.2001