Alois Janak *1924; † 2024
The Dialectic of Reality and Dream
To immerse oneself in the world of Alois Janak’s art is to immerse oneself in a dream world—the world of a mature painter and graphic artist who has found his own path and has not only been consistently following it for decades but is also constantly moving forward along it. Let us embark on this journey with him, accompany him for a stretch of his path, and let ourselves be carried along, following his dreams and visions. This path is one that departs from the normalities of everyday life, rejects rationality, and instead vehemently demands emotion and imagination. It magically transports the viewer into an enchanting visual world—a world dominated by beauty, humor, charm, and allure.
There is a remarkable consistency in the artist’s work, which is expressed, on the one hand, in his symbolically coded motifs and, on the other, in his formal, artistic execution. In this sense, Janak’s oeuvre is based on two distinct pillars: the uniquely achieved formal perfection and technical mastery, on the one hand, and the boundless wealth of imagination, artistic visions, and utopias of the creative genius, on the other.
So what exactly is it that makes a Janak a Janak—and thus so unmistakable? Two aspects deserve special mention in a brief description: on the one hand, the rigorous, formal-aesthetic signature—that element of uniqueness and style—and, on the other, the artist’s entirely unique visual world, a manageable repertoire of motifs in its countless manifestations and fascinating diversity.
From a formal and aesthetic perspective, Janak can be recognized as an artist-designer. Like an architect, he constructs the basic framework of his paintings: using a pencil, ruler, and compass, he creates pictorial fields and coordinate systems for his motifs. Lines and arrows, circles, squares, and rectangles become basic structures, aids for orientation, and signposts. In their delicacy and geometric simplicity, they remain in the finished artwork as relics of the creative process, elevated to become artistic elements in their own right. Added to this is the writing, which appears in Janak’s paintings as an element on par with the geometric forms. These are titles, explanations, and free associations of thought, which are highly relevant not only in terms of content but also aesthetically. For it is never simply text that is incorporated, but calligraphy—that is, writing understood as an autonomous, artistic value. The lettering forms an integral part of the free artistic motif and thus contributes significantly to the aesthetic and poetic impact of the images.
Janak’s understanding of art is thus universal: he emphasizes the close relationship between painting and other art forms—architecture, scientific drawing, literature, and poetry—and blurs the boundaries between them. The artist draws on various elements of scientific constructivism and literary poetry to shape them into a total work of art in his pieces.
In addition to the graphic, drawing-like elements described earlier, the painterly aspect also remains of great significance. While the linear elements—always clear and distinct—define the form and divide the composition into various planes and objects, color appears—as if imposed on the objects after the fact—as an independent quality and thus essential to their nature. It is an indispensable tool for the artist, an instrument for creating harmony. Janak’s palette is colorful but not garish. Like his motifs, it is life-affirming, poetically delicate, and cheerful. It evokes a sense of lightness. The free, open-colored background—devoid of any sense of depth—allows the objects in the picture to float, detaching them from reality. The finest nuances, refractions of light, shading, and delicate, soft color gradients create an open and atmospheric effect that gives rise to mysterious color melodies and soft tones, into whose dreamlike rhythm the motifs blend. Drawing from a small repertoire—a handful of carefully selected symbolic images and metaphors—the artist creates an infinite number of expressive possibilities through numerous variations and changes in composition, all executed with a sincere love of detail.
The artist loves nature and the maritime world: flowers, animals, lakes, and the sea are his favorite subjects. He is equally fascinated by technology: ships, airplanes, balloons, and lighthouses bring his pictorial spaces to life, detached from the constraints of space and time. But even the simplest everyday objects—such as shoes, umbrellas, light bulbs, bottles, or inkwells—find their place in Janak’s world of motifs. In short: Janak loves life in all its facets. And this love, in turn, is reflected in his art. He lifts ordinary things—the things that surround us every day as a matter of course—out of their everydayness and normality, giving them a new raison d’être in his entirely unique world of imagination. The artist shows us what we think we know through different eyes, from a new perspective.
Janak views the world through the eyes of a child. He is able to cast a filter of fantasy over things, thereby imbuing them with an unknown, mysterious fascination. Despite his realistic attention to detail, the depiction of the dreamlike dominates. The realm of reality dissolves into the realm of the unconscious; the mundane is transformed into the wondrous. The images become unsolvable riddles that activate categories of understanding different from those of our everyday lives. In this sense, a kinship emerges between Alois Janak’s art and Surrealism, as well as with the great artistic figures of our century, such as René Magritte or Salvador Dalí. Yet, rooted in this art-historical context and tradition, Janak presents himself as an independent personality, an autodidact. His dialectic of reality and dream makes him a significant artistic figure of our time.
Text: Sina Strüssmann
Alois Janak
Born in 1924 in Schönpriesen (Krasne Bresno), Czechoslovakia, as the son of school principal Alois Janak
1944: Graduated from high school in Prague
1944–45: Served in the aircraft industry in Prague during the war
1945–48: Studied agricultural sciences at the Technical University in Prague. Expelled from the university for political reasons.
1946–49: Studied painting privately. Spent time on his own farm. Completed two months of military service.
1949: Fled to Bavaria and Paris
1951: Worked as a radio director in Munich
1952: Began to devote himself intensively to oil painting
1954 Married the daughter of the Munich composer Prof. Dr. Hans Sachsse. Two children.
1956 Stayed in the U.S.
1957 First exhibition in exile at the Marcel Bernheim Gallery, Paris. Since then, numerous exhibitions in Europe and overseas.
1982 Has lived and worked in Switzerland since 1982