Josse Pyl

Meanings permeate all components of Josse Pyl’s artistic work: shapes, motifs, materials, details, compositions, techniques, titles. Everything holds contents that are not separated from form. Even the technique of the work – frottage – resembles activities associated with the body, such as gnashing teeth or brushing them, refining words and growling them between one’s teeth. The technique of frottage goes back to a time when the image could be mechanically reproduced. The imprint of type is also a ruin of type. Technically speaking, all the pieces of information on the image are equal to one another. The visual absorbs both, the digital and manual modes. It intermingles the comical with comics and the textual with the figurative. It mixes what is on the surface (drawing) with what is underneath (the basis for frottage). Pyl created a series of stone reliefs as a basis for the frottages; using paper, pencil and scribble they become ruins and their message is taken over and distorted by the drawing. Frottages emerge from the bones of our voices and communication gets reduced to the physical intimacy of the mouth. The reality of the objects is framed in the black-and-white world of language and fiction. The past is being rewritten. Text: Edith Jeřábková