Paintings of Josef Achrer are about dialogue between a real and a moonshine, a soul and a world, a rationality and games, but first of all the dialogue among spaces.

There is a theme of a free space and barriers mainly comming out from former paintings of his very typical and well-known creation. The painter likes to form obstructions and hindrances, he directly „needles“ them, domesticates a picture space to an inch. He frames in his imaginings by labyrinth of symbols, which formate channels inside and outside the soul. He lays down the imagining structure on a canvas . He forms new units which are artificial – but in a context and with a forceful statement. Above all, he does this in an abstract level with a particular poetry of things, sometimes with a drastic exaggeration of a human experience in epical messages. There are twisters of a macro – and micro world in a structural shape absorbing the existing reality with its traps and a virtual reality is being offered to us instead. Truly speaking the author offers the virtual reality mainly to himself. In this way he creates some interspace for „messages right for him“. He copes with a reality feeling (sometimes with a black humour) and hide it inside the labyrinth. As everything else, also this process is two-edged process. Allows a formal chasing, but builds a hedge of circulation. Some lustral procedure is being formed in this way for the author, which also offers catharsis forms for spectator – if he accepts a painter´s irony and humour accompanied by all his paintings. Unique humour. Sometimes the bitter social irony, another time an intimate look (rather overlook) at a life covered by stylish nets of the paintings. Painting names are symbolical by themselves and reflect a social – intimate statement. By the way, it is very difficult statement in its context. Boyish symbols as a satire of a male world responsibility that is infirmed by a female world all the time, self-irony and bitterness. A clean pleasure and a hard-core of the author´s statement on the other side simply cannot be ignored. There is possibility only to accept it and penetrate into his mystery with him.

Achrer´s creation is playful and violent, luxuriates in a poetic grotesqueness and could be ironically sarcastic but couldn´t be evil. A principal of a complicated and sofisticated creative order is a sensual adventure, a joy by a vision and an exhaustless fantasy. Joseph Achrer works tirelessly and at the same time amuses himself fabulously in his effort to stay fair-minded.

He is a non-classifiable, original, hardworking, obstinate and talented. Everything what applies to a human being, applies to the artist with his longing to steal the power of colours, to model them to the meshes of subconsciousness and over-realistic sensation. However, everything arranged with a help of accurate formative symbols, ways, lanes, labyrinths, special dreamy areas crowned by a big banality of the reality. And above that all a sarcastic Kerberos guards a slightly violet territory entrance into the picture, pointing at a perishable existence and at a vulnerability of the soul. Latest pictures specify newer forms of Achrer´s painting expression. They release more space in the paintings. This area is in response immediately filled by a tension as it were a reflection and suspicion of the prior labyrinth. A limitation of the space already hasn´t been its restriction. It is time to breathe in. All painter’s formation is filled by a circulation which pulls down the spectator to a whirpool of a non-pleasant feeling and thoughts for many times. However, he makes us to cope with the offered space and the whirlpool just by ourselves. It is not possible to ignore the author´s throwing gloves – no matter we like it or not – and to not respond, to not polemize or merge, to not face up to it.

Claudine Končinská

October 2004