Jaromír Gargulák: The Thinker - University Museum VSB-TUO

Name: The Thinker

Author: Jaromír Gargulák

Dating: 2006

Location: free-standing in the exterior on the terraced slope along 17. listopadu Street outside the New Auditorium (in Czech orig. Nová Aula) in Poruba

Execution: bronze heroic sculpture

ALIEN ON THE SPHERE

A remarkably disembodied male figure of The Thinker reminds more of an insect body with a strong emphasis on the limbs, “head” and the negative space inside the body. It is seated on a sphere placed on a short neck from a plinth that is a plate anchored in the ground, which is part of the sculpture. According to the author’s statement, the Brno section of the international company OHL ŽS, a.s. was the ordering party of the work.

The bronze sculpture The Thinker could evoke a connection with a figure of the same name, which concentrates a gurgling vortex of figures in the stories of the famous Hell Gate by French sculptor August Rodin. However, besides the same material, we would not be able to find any connection between the two artworks. Gargulak’s large-scale sculpture is included in a variety of the author’s characteristic creatures, whose bodies diverge from a common empirical experience.

Just before the completion of The Thinker, a voluminous book of drawings Faces/Obličeje was published in a representative edition. As if the author wanted to remind that everything had its own face – perhaps paradoxically even The Thinker’s hand or a bowed torso. Just as the wax is malleable and, at the same time, treacherous when somebody is trying to shape it, so as the figure is as if it were carrying the ability to transform itself. Indeed, the author sometimes calls it an Alien, which may also associate other layers of meaning. The variability and reversibility of flowing shapes are transformed from the material into an idea of the statue. The original project counted on a different placing of the figure: It was supposed to “be floating”, set on a golden top of a flattened sphere that would be embedded in a ring of greenery. The intended place of mounting was also changed since the author designed the location of the sculpture so that it would be projected directly into an open patio outside the Auditorium. However, the ball remained non-gilded, greenery has not filled the space even after all these years, and the planned installation of the sculpture on the site remained unfinished with a bare lower supporting structure.

Sculpture The Thinker, photo by Roman Polášek

Sketch by Jaromír Gargulák on The Thinker sculpture, author

Jaromír Gargulák

(1958)

Work: The Thinker

Jaromír Gargulák was born, lives and works in Brno. He came across sculpture through a purely technical, highly sophisticated technical field; he graduated from the foundry at Brno University of Technology, and he moved from disciplines focusing on precise casting to the sphere of artistic imagination. However, even freely expressive works cannot happen without the knowledge of materials and the sense of their physical, and eventually optical and haptic, qualities. As for spatial objects, the sculptor works exclusively with metal, using the technique of lost wax. He also uses wax to model his sculptures; he prefers this material for its formable, flowing nature since these characteristics are also reflected in Gargulák’s definitive author’s manuscript, characteristic of his bronzes. The initial wax model always perishes, smelts out of the mould, and therefore every piece only exists in a single cast. The sculptor works in brass, yellow and red bronze, lead, and steel. The sculptor has also been drawing intensely; the drawings, not just sculptural, fill in countless sheets of surreal creatures and objects seen both from the outside and in. The main motif is a face with an eye or a pair of eyes that continues to occupy the viewer’s attention, but also compels a look beyond the depicted and to seek encrypted meaning. Even in his early works, the author intensively addressed the empty, the negative space inside the plastic body. Gargulák’s sculptures are often spectacular in terms of both their shape and surface treatment. Visually, the contrasts between polished and roughened patinated surfaces are usually quite noticeable.