Spiritual Space

Visual expression cannot be described in words, because words only take us further from its true meaning. It is not sounds assembled into words, sentences and thoughts, but direct speech that projects an inner urgency, intuitions, concerns, fear and love. It is direct speech in which colours, relationships between shapes, structures and the contrast of light and darkness are the words, sentences and thoughts of another form of communication. Words often deform, distort and manipulate. They create imprecise and sometimes false ideas that do not reach the essence of the message. The language of visual art, however, is connected to distinct levels of our consciousness. Josef Fronk's paintings are simply paintings. It is entirely immaterial whether the content that served Josef as a starting point is present in the painting or not. What matters is the painting, its message, its spiritual space, its radiation of energy and feeling, one person touching another. Josef is not ashamed of deeply felt emotions - joy, love, pain, moments of happiness - or of being filled with energy. He rejects the calculation behind a concept and refuses to weigh things in terms of topicality, fashion or the dictates of postmodernism. In formal terms, the principal unifying element in his recent work has been the vertical. For some, it may evoke a prison, pyjamas, a striped mattress, grain or something else. For Josef, it is more a symbol of vitality, of a path leading upwards, a motif of firmness and certainty. In pain, the certainty of joy; in chaos, the certainty of order; in the uncertainty of the next day, the certainty of awakening. The space of two basic planes is the defining expressive element, overlapping to conceal as well as to create, to structure, build and organise tremors, fragments and vigorous gestures. Vibrant patches and traces of colour are set against the delineation of precise shapes. The contrast lies not only in the psychology of shapes and their return from chaos to order, but above all in the expression and construction of colour. The dirty beige of oil-painted staircases and the radiant blue of an open summer sky. Enclosed and open space. Colour here is not an aid or a description: it is a metaphor, an expression of the painting's message, an inner communication of a life experienced with deep emotion.