Ján Hlavatý: Ostrov v duši

Ján Hlavatý was born in 1955 in Zlaté Moravce. In 1975-1981 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava under prof. Ján Želibský. He currently lives and creates in Bratislava.

In the context of contemporary painting in Slovakia, the vivid abstract or broad-spectrum abstracting work of Ján Hlavatý has a unique and specific place. Despite the fact that painting trends in Slovakia in the second half of the 1980s followed the path of the so-called „new or wild painting“, Hlavatý was already taking his own path at the beginning of the 1980s. The artist gradually develops his own distinctive way of expression, which is extremely extensive and cognitive. From delicate, almost transparent valleys, drawing brushstrokes, to nervous pasty strokes and splashes, from quiet poetic, even lyrical tones, to monumental symphonies of colour.

Colour is its basic telling word and building material. In many cases it is built on the experience of the seen, the palpation of the tangible and the transposition through the interior, the mental into colouristic compositions. His expression is not only based on, but directly uses figurative elements as stimuli and essential starting points for a definitive composition-content. If we can find a specific sign in the artist’s paintings, if we can trace a certain figurative direction, it may be lost in the tangle of action, gestural brushstrokes in the very next painting. The viewer’s „task“ with the given paintings is not to look for concretizing signs of a figurative subtext, but to try to enter Jan Hlavatý’s paintings. He does not want to bind the composition to any specific content, on the contrary, he tries to make their message open to the widest possible range of interpretations, so that the viewer, looking at them, is free to create associations according to his own imaginative disposition. In fact, Ján Hlavatý, with his expression of expressive abstraction, represents one of the most significant personalities of the contemporary Slovak art scene. The author’s sensitivity and humility before knowledge give the results on the pictorial surface the hallmark of truthfulness and emotional power of the statement.