I saw Pavel talking about a statue he was going to create. He slightly stepped aside to stand firmly. Like a man getting ready for a fight. He lifted his arms up to his hips and he buried his stretched fingers into the air as if he buried them into the clay. Small flames flashing in his eyes resembled the fire heating up the burner of the ceramic kiln. Not many words were said. He flickered up to the sky nodding contentedly, stretched his right hand and clapped the object he saw in front of him. Then he turned around and went to the cellar to bring the clay.


FOREBODING GENESIS


   At the beginning there was a sculptor. He took the clay and moulded his own picture from it. He, perhaps, fired it by the sun glow he ignited beforehand, and breathed the life into it. No need to discuss what was first. A man started to sing, dance and make poems only after being sculptured.
   And how it happened? What was the breathe creating reason and emotion? What was the breathe waking up the might of mind and the need of beauty and love?
   I sense the answer in Pavel’s statues and relief. It is about infiltration and fusion. Connecting the earth-clay with the heaven or universe. You can believe it or not. I will use the term “heaven” because it is nicer. In relief the heaven permeates into the solid soil by discharges of energy and light emanation. They get connected by questions and answers, by blending and imprints. Notice that angels walk on their toe.Those relief seem to be like the age-old boards bearing the truth about how everything was. How everything is. The statues just for a while – just for a light year or two- petrified themselves in gracefully living movement. Firmly anchored in the ground, gazing and lifting up their fragile heads, hands and wings, or even legs in propagation, heavenwards in joy or in sorrow and travail also their worries and their burdens. A man feels well among them, goodness and warmth glow from them.

And then he mixed and moulded the clay, he stacked it and spattered it with the sweat drops, he fondled it with his hands and curved it with his fingers. It was growing and coming into life under his hands. He dried her and coloured her, and in the end he fired her in the kiln. He erected her then carefully, even when she was still hot, in front of him and he said: ”Good Morning, Firefly….” I really saw her gently moving her wings.


Jiří Křižan