Karel Dicker

The deep melancholy of Karel Dicker’s paintings plunges us into the meanders of solitude. No figure populates his work, but remains.

Remains of moments lived, or not, alone, in company, or not.
Relic of soulerie and divagation immediately disappeared like volutes of smoke, the painting of Karel Dicker seems twilight.

Yet it is the light that already appears, dawn gives way to too long nights and early morning we can finally distinguish the pattern of the tablecloth, the transparency of the ashtray, the smoke that still rises at the edge of the cold cigarette butt.

When you smoke, you don’t talk.

Karel Dicker’s still lifes give us with deep honesty a daily routine that we are invited to observe. His painting testifies precisely to his attachment to simple things, to this banality gleaned by fragments. It is an almost childish look that is posed on the reality that surrounds it and from which one must escape well.
A way to practice painting as one would write Haiku.

A ritualized, cathartic practice, made of repetitions, ashtrays by ten, the same, with its variations at the time of coffee, coffee makers too, painted from all angles, at all hours, or other liquids in stormy weather, at night.

His work on color and light relates to these various states. We can not but think of the composition of Morandi, so many pitchers, jugs on hot ground. A window, a table corner, a bottle and all the possible variations, Karel explores and studies techniques and materiality of painting, in repeated layers as well, as their motifs, their subjects, modulated. And then these wooden frames, also declined, to infinity, in baroque forms, ornate hoops specific to church paintings. As a slight irreverence made to the established order, to the norm, to the right thinking. A way of saying that everything is learned, a childish thirst to do and redo and understand how it is done, and do it again.

A window, a table corner, a bottle, an ashtray, a cigarette.
The sun is already rising, unless it sets.

Emilie Pischedda