It is not so obvious that there is still a dynasty of painters in today's hectic world. Let's call it Baroque. And yet sometimes it happens and we are here and now witnessing this small miracle. A small one? This dynasty of painters bears the name Samec, when the grandfather, the eldest, painted, and the father, the younger, and the son, the youngest, also paint - and the latter two are opening the exhibition here today. But the father's sister, and therefore the son's aunt, Varvara, now called Divisova, also paints. All in all, it's a complicated story, a bit like a theme for a novel or a TV series, if we were to delve deeper into the family history. Which in its own way reflects the turbulent history of Europe in the last century. History, but fortunately only art, is also reflected in the work of all the members of the dynasty.

But let's concentrate on the two presented here. Nevertheless, it is not easy with them. Jan Samec the Elder was born in Karlovy Vary on November 18, 1955 and is something of a legend on the local art scene. He is not only a painter and ceramist and the central axis of the aforementioned artistic family clan, but also the long-standing director of the Karlovy Vary Art Gallery. The duality of artist and gallery owner is not common, but in Jan's case he manages to harmoniously combine both activities and artistically cultivate the spa region, which was put to a fatal test by the abandonment of the German population after the Second World War. With this cultural cultivation in a different environment, after all, as a descendant of Belarusian emigration to the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, Jan has had genetic experience in the truest sense of the word. But I'm really just getting started. I'll stick to the pictures.

Jan, Johannes, the elder, believes in the painterly construction of a picture, as promoted and developed by modernism. Abstract compositions of delicately gestural strokes of color refer both to the autonomous existence of pictorial relationships and to a subtle reflection of the landscape or its residues in artistic memory. But the painter is also attracted by geometric interventions in the picture surface in the form of a square. Geometry does not exist in nature; it is a civilizational and cultural phenomenon and, in art, one of the key elements of modernism. The mutual encounter between the painting ground and geometric representation creates an aesthetic tension, which nevertheless leads to harmony in Samec's work.

His relationship with Jan the Younger is also harmonious, even if his painterly expression is different, more robust, more dynamic, characterized by a different pictorial experience. And just like his father, he is not a mono-professional. He is a graphic designer, a teacher and a painter. I don't know to what extent his father speaks to his painting, but given their distant, harmonious relationship, I don't think so much. However, the father certainly acts as a seductive role model. But the youngest member of the Samec family's desire to paint is strongly aroused by his grandfather. He did not experience his grandfather, but he discovers him thanks to painting, and he discovers him not only as his ancestor, but also within himself. Painting has power here. It connects us not only with our ancestors when we have a clique and are born into a dynastic family, but with all the painters that art history has had and still has. History unfolds with every gesture, every gesture has the right to immortality, every painting is immortal because it leaves behind a trace of the author's physical presence. I think we sense something of this in the youngest.

Enjoy the exhibition of the two painters and have a nice evening.

Martin Dostál

Curator of the exhibition