Tomas Rajlich Golden Times

This book pays tribute to Tomas Rajlich (Jankov, today Czech Republic, 1940), an artist internationally acclaimed as one of the most influential figures in European painting, with whom the gallery has been collaborating for years without a break.

With his monochromes, the artist established himself on the international scene, at least from the time of the memorable 1975 exhibition “Fundamental schilderkunst: Fundamental paintingin” the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. At the beginning of the following decade, Rajlich abandoned the primacy of black and white in systemic painting and opened up to the ineffable beauty of gold, the breezes of distant blue and a dull, chaste red.

It is true, he was still working with monochromes, but the gold has very different implications in those Golden Times. In a fundamental essay from 1993, Flaminio Gualdoni wrote: ‘With even greater determination, Rajlich operates on the plane of the saturated image; but now this saturation does not only concern vision; it is rather a plenitude that involves the very idea of light associated, in our culture, with the sense of colour and supernatural vertigo. This is the moment of the outburst, if only in the operational clarity of one who can but regard painting as an autonomous, physical basis of language and meaning, of more than an echo of wisdom’.

ABC-ARTE dedicated its galleries in Genoa and Milan to the Eighties of Rajlich in a vast, specific survey in which his painting, constantly moving further and further away from purely executive modalities, enters the living mystery of colour/light, nourished by an unexpected expressiveness.

Numerous works was exhibited in which gold is the dominant visual element, as well as the no less famous triadic works in which it is associated with colours that proudly reveal their very own nature. In parallel, a synthetic nucleus of paintings was shown, published in his memorable book 100 SMALL PAINTINGS, which clearly show the lucid determination that has accompanied Rajlich throughout the various phases of his work.