Il Sole ritrovato

Anyone who visited Štěpán Zavřel’s house in Rugolo will immediately recall the fountain in front of the entrance and the garden built between the stone arches, with a gleaming vegetation of hazelnuts, wild plums, palm trees, rows of miniature irises, and all around, marking the horizon, the ancient mulberry trees of the Treviso hills.

The exhibition opens with a small tribute to Štěpán Zavřel’s gardens, a dimension dear to the artist, nurtured in his books and beyond. We think of the enchanted garden of Pinin, the one loved by Liduschka, the water garden of Vodník, the secret garden of the city of flowers, and many other imagined gardens, including the garden of paradise. The brief path offered draws from the works in the collection, documenting only a portion of the master’s output, but enough to clarify its centrality and, at the same time, its variety.

Carriers of wisdom and wonder, they allow us to experience the most intimate and democratic form of art, illustration. Sita Jucker, Květa Pacovská, Carme Solé Vendrell, and Nicoletta Costa are gathered here, as they once were, in their radiant diversity, to begin the telling of infinite stories.

The suspended atmospheres of Ivan Gantschev, Eugen Sopko, and Marija Lucija Stupica suggest pausing in spaces of wonder and waiting for the magic to unfold, in the perfection of silence.

It is a sweet melancholy capable of giving way to the subtle and tender irony of the creatures in precarious balance by Emanuele Luzzati, David McKee, Ulises Wensell, Emilio Urberuaga, and Marie José Sacré.

The largest space is devoted to dreamlike visions, true variations on the theme of imagination: the poetic micromonds of Josef Paleček, the chromatic energy of Józef Wilkoń, the fantastical inventories of Leonardas Gutauskas, the romanticism of Jindra Čapek, the flights of Arcadio Lobato, Sophie Fatus, and Fiona Moodie, the refined figures of Letizia Galli, the seductive secrets of Maurizio Olivotto.

The final section embraces gazes toward the East, with Persian tales by Alain Bailhache and Feeroozeh Golmohammadi, and Chinese fairy tales by Jiann-Hwa Wuu.

We are faced with mostly unpublished works. Architectures, landscapes and figures, created on papers with irregular cuts and with combined techniques. They are a testimony to an intimate work carried out within the spaces of experimentation and freedom of the artist.

The section “Štěpán Zavřel’s Studies” presents some works made by the artist over a time span between the 1960s and the early 1980s: from the architectures made for the book “Sie folgen dem Stern”, to studies of Venice, up to trials for ex libris. In every case, we are faced with mostly unpublished works – architectures, landscapes, figures – whose formats do not seem to conform to the large dimensions the master accustomed us to, but rather appear on papers with irregular cuts. The variety of techniques, in turn, documents an executive freedom probably given by the intimacy of the context. It is interesting to observe how some of these studies contain one of the fundamental matrices of the master’s imagery: the circular form, transformed into arch or dome, body of water, vegetation, luminous star. It is a game of supple, interrupted, closed, loosened lines, as in the illustrations identified in the exhibition with the titles “The Lake,” “The Night Flight,” “The Reedbed.” The figures also seem to refer to an archaic matrix, a synthetic and two-dimensional outline, as we can see in the figures of the Magi and of the Persian king.
The section “Štěpán Zavřel’s Studies” should be understood as a small insight, and a cue for reflection, within the broader historical-artistic path arranged in the Štěpán Zavřel Museum. It is a way to enter, on tiptoe, into the spaces of experimentation and creation of the artist. (s.p.)