30.6.2014: Otto Placht

Otto Placht

Metaforms of Jungle

27th of June - 31st of August 2014

Galerie Václava Špály, st. Národní 30, Praha 1

Admission: 40 Czk full, 20 Czk reduced (students, seniors)

"Amazonia - tropical jungle as well as traditional cosmological vision or 'mundo espiritual' - is virtually a natural symbol of permanent transformation - life cycle, rebirth and death, mutation and adaptation in order to survive... The same are my paintings - overlayed and transformed in time, reflecting the survival and of being experience." : as described in the author's words.

Otto Placht, a 52 years old Czech artist lives in a Peruvian town Pucallpa
surrounded by Amazonian jungle and on River Ucayalli, one of the two streams of which the Amazon river is fed. He graduated from the Acadamy of Arts in Prague just before the fall of communist regime and even worked as an assistant to renown Czech artist Jiří Načeradský for couple of years.

We could recognise a New Age front runner in him, a philosopher by nature, to whom coming to Peruvian jungle and getting married to a local indian girl comes as a way of abandoning western style of living in reuniting with cosmos in a `primitive` society.

In his own words: "I have begun the actual "session" in black. I am approaching light through darkness, cutting through the night with a knife's blade and by doing so letting the sunlight in. I work just before day breaks, waiting until the sunshine spills over the river's bank horizon and dries last layers of paint."