Interview with Janis Nedela

Given his concern with intuition, with universal reciprocity, Nedéla makes a surprising number of studies. There is at least one maquette for every large painting. The maquettes rehearse the procedures, the mantra of actions that will be used for a full size painting. They are very rarely small-scale versions of the finished work. The maquette for Cat. #41, for instance, contains three panels in the same colours but the dots are almost the same size as the full size works, a completely different relationship to the work as a whole.

A lot of them do vary and that’s the whole idea. They help you to resolve, to work out issues that you dream and you think about. In your mind you know it will work, but when you put pen to paper or whatever, it turns out that what the brain said was going to be OK is not acceptable. Doing little studies helps you look at ways that might be better. It might just happen that the study is overdone, too worked, so that enables you to stop before you have gone too far.

The studies often have a precise miniature painstaking quality, but this is belied by Nedéla’s attitude to them as trial runs.

They probably look like that but they’re not. They’re basically very quick easy ideas. The majority of the studies are all based round the pencil. The pencil helped me make them. Only in the last twenty percent which relate to this show did I move away from the pencil idea and actually paint the studies.

The studies in this exhibition allow the visitor to trace the evolution of the entire Enigma series as system of signs.

In Cat. #60, and Cat. #61 painted nails and flat strips arranged in a Kandinsky-like manner, link the act of making a mark with a coloured pencil to the act of nailing a work or a book together as Nedéla did in some of his earliest book pieces. Nails were amongst the instruments he used to create his latest paintings. In Cat. #90 the panel is encrusted with shavings of enamel from the exterior of a pencil. Cat. #71 is simply a rainbow stack of new pencils. Cat. #75 lays pencil leads on bed of shavings. And so it goes on, each study adds a new dimension to the project as a whole. They are like hieroglyphs, elaborated illuminated letters, that can be assembled in the pages of the book which is the whole Enigma project.

Cat. #75

	For instance in Cat. #68, which contains the sawn off tips of pencils, sunk into white paint, pointing vertically outward, their circular images foreshadow the superimposed and off-centre roundels in several of the paintings in Enigma #3. The three panels of Cat. #59 contain a series of variations on the theme of the roundel. In Cat. #101 he develops this idea into an intuitive pattern of roundels of paint of different diameters. Nedéla is working out his sense of the ways in which coloured marks can occupy a space most harmoniously, most seductively to the eye.
Cat. #99
	A comparison of these studies with the extraordinarily animated, but perfectly balanced surfaces of the large paintings such as the lush, multicolored Cat. #101 (Study for #46), and the sparse blue grey mesh of Cat. #46, infrequently dotted with tiny colored orbs, demonstrates the range of spaces, textual rhythms and harmonies they can achieve. Two of the large vertical works Cat. #46 and Cat. #43 show the extremes of presence that these experiments can reach.
Cat. #101

In Cat. #43 a series of roughly equal sized dots in a range of colours, including white, carefully balanced in tone and chroma, so that no simple figure in dots of one colour can leap to the eye, are set up in a rough grid. The colours are also sequenced in a half-intuitive, half-systemic manner so that no clear sequence emerges yet the surface as a whole appears far from random. It is an exquisite product of consistent human intention and the continuous pressure of chance and intuition. Under a relaxed gaze, the white dots, which are also laid out on a diagonal grid, can evoke tight rhythmic constellations. Another almost mythic layer of presence emerges in the work. In Cat. #45, on the other hand every coloured dot is caught in roundel of black, set up on a roughly drafted pencil grid, an entrapment all the more dramatic because each is hand painted. These coloured centres vibrate against their bonds, with a collective energy as subtle as Brownian motion, the indicator of energy omnipresent throughout the universe.

Every work in Enigma #3 possesses a unique intense presence. This is an astonishing achievement given the temptation to become formulaic, to merely extend existing discoveries. The greatest delight of the show is to trace each one, to engage every dazzling detail.