Josef Bolf's Childhood World of Anxiety

Only recently have I discovered obscure paintings by a contemporary Czech painter, Josef Bolf. Most of his pictures from 2006 onwards have been made by means of using a childly "naive" technique of scraping off of a layer of black drawing ink dabbed on a pink wax-crayoned layer. This technique by itself introduces the theme of childhood which is developed throughout. There is the surreal merging with the real, half-human and half-animal, comics stylization verging into prodigious precision, the spell of the omnipresence of ambivalence and disunity hovering over the world of childhood. There is no idealization, no safety, no carelessness, no innocence; there is perennial sense of depression and vulnerability and an obsessive longing for self-destruction. The pictured world seems to be conquered by sadness, anxiety, uprootedness, death and pain.

(Josef Bolf)