Olšany 1931

Jindrich Styrsky made "Olšany" with paint on what looks like a rough canvas, and you can almost feel the push and pull he must have felt. The colors are dreamy, like a half-remembered place with hazy blues and greens that suggest water and sky. Then, BAM! A blobby black form appears with strokes of red inside, like a weird internal organ escaped from the body. It rests above a neat, almost industrial-looking shape, a solid red block. The contrast between the soft, atmospheric background and these hard-edged forms creates a sense of tension. Styrsky must have been grappling with something here. It reminds me a little of early de Chirico—a scene that’s both familiar and deeply unsettling, a world of shapes just barely holding still. It’s like he’s inviting us to question what we see, to find our own meaning in the space between the real and the imagined. And isn’t that what art is all about?