Luděk Šofr↓

About the work

The Scythe in the Sight of Yours

Luděk Šofr is a “plain air” painter – he literally plans his paintings through air. The dominant sensor is sight. For Šofr, the eye is an open organ. Similarly, he approaches his paintings as an organ, a digestive tract one must pass through. In this way, they are specific carriers of certain temporalities. One must spend time with them in order to see them. The “near (opposite) side” in this digestion is the landscape as a central motif. Through the ocular instrument known as the “organon” – a “technology” of the gaze used to model life – he endeavors to grasp the landscape in an encounter on the elementary level of broader contexts. It is an encounter through sight, meaning through the gaze. The gaze of Šofr’s graduate work is framed by the encounter between the “blade” of the landscape and our own. Between a blade of grass and a metal blade. It frames the event horizon as a blade thrust into the eyes of the living. Šofr applies his experiences in a number of media, including painting, work with clay, and writing.

The work of Luděk Šofr is founded on continuity and explores broader themes of the Big Slice – the walls of troughs; dry, empty, but still living landscapes. The Big Slice is the burden of the land, the landscape, a slice of land. It is a shared slice of the whole, the beginning of a shared existence in the landscape. For Šofr, cutting off a slice is to make a conscious commitment to contribute to the World.