New intervention of Jan Rajlich jr.

According to legend, the first word of little Pablo Picasso waspiz, an abbreviation oflápizor pencil in Spanish.  We are not aware of the first word of young Jan Rajlich, yet it would not be surprising if he loudly demanded a pencil as a toddler. While it would be naïve to develop the comparison with an art "monster" of Picasso's calibre, for Jan Rajlich drawing was his principal pastime as evidenced by drawings from his early childhood.

At the age of four he "mastered" perspective, shocking his parents (see a drawing with street lamps running back in perspective), and in his drawings recording childhood experiences from the Brno Trade Fair he soon discovered the theme of the human 'buzz' to be continually elaborated up to the present.  A constant feature in his drawings is humour. Here it should be noted that Rajlich's growing up and formation were taking place in the sixties when the nonsense poetry of Christian Morgenstern was at last fully appreciated and the "humorous" drawings by the art superstar Saul Steinberg forThe New Yorkermagazine were worshipped and exhibited in art galleries inspiring artists around the globe. We do not need to go to America, let's just mention the duo Karel Nepraš and Jan Steklík from the Crusaders' School of Pure Humour without Wit originating in Prague. Rajlich could well relate with this pedigree of conceptualised humour and continued to develop it in an original way, as shown by the series ofPaper Formsor the minimalist series dedicated to the senses from the beginning of the eighties. Another unmistakeable source of inspiration for Rajlich was the psychedelic culture of hippie posters with acid colour spectrums, but mainly with an endlessly winding line. It is a little known fact that the graphic artist of the Yellow Submarine was Heinz Edelman, a native of Ústí nad Labem, who was resettled after WWII. It is worth observing the changing relationship between image and letters, or rather text, in Rajlich's drawings. He starts with a caption, a punch line or a comment traditionally situated at the bottom edge, later the text increasingly moves inside the format, usually via comic bubbles, until it goes completely independent and exists without the drawing. Alternatively, the artist even creates the image by drawing with letters. At this point we should point out the continual intimate proximity of graphic design. Rajlich's father, Jan Rajlich Sr., was a renowned designer and founder of the Brno Biennial; working with the image and the typographic component was his daily bread. And for the son, the poster medium became a natural means of disseminating drawings and a tool of international communication in art. Drawing, or more precisely a line and a coloured area, is a dominant feature in several of Rajlich's paintings which garnered period acclaim.

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