INTRODUCTION
In the compendium of Jan Kristofori’s work - as presented, after several publications, in this collection of texts and reproductions - the main characteristic feature is the remarkable organic unity of his work. Despite all his unease, the search and courage to take untread paths in which Jan Kristofori finds new and always different depictions of his own experienced reality, the work of Jan Kristofori, as a whole, represents an integral analogy. His work depicts not only the formal relations between single subjects, but above all the general spirit of the author’s creative effort in the immediate manifestation of his creative individuality, as well as his personal unity with the artistic objectives of our time. These are also inspired by the variability of his range of themes and his own means of expression, which in his case fundamentally revolve around the direct challenges of life, mutual human relations, life stories and life dramas. Yet the dramatic nature of his path of development, which is closely connected to his fate, is also given by the fact that each composition is an unrepeatable struggle to imagine the very material he shapes. One can see the struggle with the material encourages the author’s imagination and contributes to the creation of various analogies.
Sometimes he is more specific with regard to his vision and materializes them into figurative scenes. Elsewhere however, he creates the language of the painting structure itself. The analogies that emerge in this way are communicated by means of their unique symbolic value. Their effectiveness is based on the creative participation of the spiritual impulses that give Jan Kristofori’s paintings their specific expressivity.
However, as Jan Kristofori is short of any idyll and, above all, any literary reflections of traditional topics – although he clearly envisages the importance of the topic as creative motivation - he is able to evoke emotions and emotional responses through his inventiveness, which is determined by his struggle with the physical aspects of colour. So these emotions become the indicators of the direction to the spiritual values of their creator. The structure of Jan Kristofori’s painting itself and its material aspects are therefore a gateway to his spiritual universe, a gateway into the realm of his innermost experiences. It is a real manifestation of his vital activity, the real bonds connected to the course of his life. Jan Kristofori is one of those artists who are unable to simply state something as a motif in the realization of their imagination. As active in his attitude to the events that have accompanied him on his way in life, he has a similarly active view of the forms of his creative work.
The driving force behind his creative efforts is the conflict between his sensitive mind and his imagination fed by the events of the outside world. Imagination often encounters strict and belligerent reality and then there is no alternative but to breakdown and balance or shape these defined areas according to the system of relations he discovered during his work with the resistance and the random nature of painting structure. Sometimes this conflict may appear in the form of friction between an ideal and disturbing scepticism, in the form of a battle between a certain picture of the world and the author’s piercing truth concerning his daily experience.
Each such work will inevitably win its historical position in the art situation of its period, where a quotation from Enrico Crispolti’s work concerning the history of informel comes to mind. The basis of his work on the role of informel is an entrance into the new reality of modern man, which is to be directly manifest in the complexity of human psyche, together with the intentional effect of raw/crude material as a picture of the author’s anxiety and existentional noetical scepticism. However, at the same time it presupposes a devaluation of existing values. His measure is based solely on the primary contact of his hand with the material. He is striving to "touch a world as yet unknown, a measure based on despair and encouraged by the combat drama of man, that was inevitably related to his existence," - as stated by M. Nešlehová.
The question arises - doesn’t Jan Kristofori’s work deserve a more comprehensive appraisal, exceeding by means of his personal spirituality the dynamics of creative gesture as a reflection of the feelings of pure hopelessness, so that we can see him as an artist showing us the way to existentional certainties?
František Dvořák
