Someone once said that painters are people who want to hide and expose themselves at the same time. This results in a labyrinth where the artist is comfortably lost. But the labyrinth's purpose is not to obfuscate what is otherwise a direct path, to encode a simple meaning, a slogan or a message, but to present the labyrinth of the soul in its true form.
G. W. Leibnitz, a baroque polymath, described the soul as comprising two floors. The bottom floor with windows, which are reserved for the folds of matter. It has "common rooms, with 'several small openings:' the five senses". The upper floor is a "closed private room, decorated with a 'drapery diversified by folds'" [G.Deleuze: The Fold].
My paintings are attempts at such labyrinths. They are views of the lights and shadows cast by the openings of the lower floor onto the draperies on the top floor.
Ondrej Rypáček
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