Sculptor Pavel Drda is first and foremost the author of ceramic plastics and figures. The prime theme of his work is the figure, human and animal. Working with his favourite material, ceramics, he leaves uncovered its raw beauty, rough grainy structure and its natural atmosphere which is just toned or brought to life with engoba - the coloured clay. Clay is both a building material as well as an expressing and content making medium. Pavel Drda with gladness of „the one who forms“, moulds, impresses himself into the pliant matter, thrills supple material with his thousands touches. And there he pictures his own identity trails - irreplaceable prints. He signs his work with his unique handwriting by relief with squeezed hollows, compact scratch shadings and expressive porous rifts. The moulding starts playing a light illusion on the surface of ceramic plastics either impressive-sensitive or expressive first - face effect.
   He focuses on intimate and monumental sculpture - plastics, statues, relief and objects he makes from ceramic clay, metal and singularly stone, artificial stone or wood, or combination of these materials. He is also engaged in applied artistic draft: pottery and smithery. Pavel Drda‘s existing sculpture works include more than 20 executions to architecture, its interiors or exteriors - reliefs, figuratively performed pillar objects, niche and free plastics, sculptures, garden and urban fountains etc. Pavel Drda finds the greatest level of performance freedom in intimate plastic on which we can perhaps the most naturally follow metamorphosis of sculptor imagery and its formation.
   The period of „ floating figures“, generally delimited by the period between the end of the 80s and the mid 90s, can be characterized as the time of the youthful feelings, tensions, hopes and dreams, the period of dream imagination deriving from the antique and prehistoric sources of inspiration. The key characteristics of this strongly „emotive time“ are the tiny torso plastics which are loaded with strong evocative charge resembling archaeology artefacts, the documents of ancient past. The full content is as though corroded by action of the time rust and covered with the patina of its flow (see bull plastics, equestrian figures).
   The antique-inspired character of author‘s works from this time indicates the quotations of some formal components of Greek-Roman art, for example wet draperies. Derivatively it is possible to mark like „antique-inspired“ also the torso state of plastics which is, however, not a directly stylistic element of the antique but is in our general knowledge tied up with the ancient sculptural objects. Pavel Drda‘s work uncovers also less readable form of such inspiration with antique art - however with more valuable significance. Flowing shape harmony, typical stoic peace of his figural plastics and softened face look with the naive smile trace make him literally „the classic“.
   His artistic work had entered the braking phase in the middle of the 90s. The time of the youthful panache, dreaming escapes and sensual explosion projection dies away and the sculptor literally „grounds his work „. The authors‘ standing figures stand on the ground steadily and the down part of the body is emphasized with its monumental limbs and exceeded foot base. The Titan and Christological theme is worked out on the athlete plastics - heroes weightlifting their „empyreal“ load (for example:  Inside a cloudlet 1997; Atlas, 1998 and so on) or with the submission of a „Man of Sorrow“ carrying the beam of his hurt, the cross (Destiny, 1998). The theme of „load“ appears in an ostensibly playful position also on the ceramic plastic called „Surface“(2001). The laying figure of a man holds on his stretched arms and legs a square vessel full of water and balances with it. The balancing of life is as well the theme of the ceramic plastic of a ropewalker (Balance, 2001) which, according to Pavel Drda, discovers the absurd nature of human existence: „We struggle for something all the time, we try to balance something all the time, even the things we trustfully adhere to are often less stable than we think.“
   A counterweight to „the big“ existentially blended topics in sculptor‘s work are the tiny, genre stories with humorous, anecdotal characteristic. The stories full of sense and feeling of human weakness, stories extraordinarily influenced by Dionysus phenomenon (Bacchus, 2001). More optimistic and playful topics come into the present author‘s work more intensively with the year of 2001. Resurrected, naively trustful, naturally related to the world - life is shown in the choice of a figure position which rests on its back naked and with hands and legs stretched up in an enjoyable expectation (Great Delight, 2001).
   During this year the Pavel Drda‘s intimate work has come up to a new evaluation of a mutual interface of ceramic clay and glass. This combination was used for the first time in 1996 for the plastics „Broken“ and „On the same board“. Currently used molten glass, whose non-artistic rough glamour emphasizes the beauty of natural formations such as ice floes, becomes „an organic“ part of author‘s plastic figures. This can be seen on the plastics of „Angela‘s Dance“ and „Angelina“ where the glass wings grow from the clay matter of the figure bodies. The author‘s artistic intention is to proceed even further. He is going to bring into his ceramic figures light glare and lighten the transparent parts of the figures with an inbuilt artificial lighting. Said with the classic: „the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not devoured it…..“

Olga Mehešová