Jan heres

Continuation from previous page.

…In addition to working with the medium of sculpture, Valencia also brought another milestone to Heres' work - he began to paint without a template, exclusively from his imagination. He started as an observer and matured into a creator. It was thinking about how to create a painting that led him to think about how a painting can evolve.  He came up with a new technique, which is a specific form of drawing with a palette knife on a canvas, cutting.  The edges are sharp, the tone -raw.  They are more spontaneous, gestural, expressive.  A similar reduction can  be  found in his sculpture that is also modeled, carved or cut.  He starts with one shape and adds another. He takes his time to build and layer the image. In the next creative phase, he intervenes with a knife so that the image does not remain at the simple graphic level.  

Thematically, it again touches on the relationship between a man and a woman and simple interactions between them, such as the act of brushing teeth together. He also adds an air-brush as an additional medium and the painting captures the moment of undressing. Intimacy replaces the erotic subtext, stylizing with air-brush transitions from geometric to organic. Oil and texture are added. Heres combines all the media he has employed so far.

He doesn't know how they will turn out, what they will look like - it all depends on the process of creation.  The Artist Residency at THINK+Feel Contemporary in Miami presented another creative stage in his evolution. This (stage) permeated the portraits and the environment in which he spent several weeks.  Different new stimuli, different culture. What Heres is immediately interested in becomes a new motif; he doesn’t spend too much time looking. We see a number of female couples, African American men and women, fascinating culture, hairstyles, clothing. He needs the image to bring up the dimension of something unexplored. The moment he starts to  repeat himself, and this is bound to happen in the series (of paintings), he immediately begins to look for new ways, no delay, no waiting around…

After B.A. Kašparová