Rudi Molacek started his creative career as a fashion photographer. His work for Harpers & Queen Magazine, Vogue, and Uomo allowed him to become a keen observer of the world of fashion and popular culture. The focus of his interests has always been the study of aesthetics and its formation in the perception of the general public. In the artworks presented in the exhibition “The Energy of Color”, this theme can be traced back to an orientation towards a formal search for the most harmonious colour and compositional solutions.

In this context, the key image is the flower, a symbol fundamental to the history of art, which is covered with a large number of metaphors, but at the same time has an indisputable quality – beauty. For Rudi Molacek, the flower is a symbol of popular culture in art – a universal formula for combining clarity, completeness and aesthetics.

Rudi Molacek looks for elements of this formula in abstractionist painting, on which he has been fully focussing since the 2000s. The rejection of figurative painting allows the artist to concentrate on compositional and technical experiments. In these he combines the tradition of Western European practices and the results of his own formal searches. In his expressive, automatic style of painting, Rudi Molacek inherits Abstract Expressionism, in particular the ‘action painting’ of the 1950s. Sharp, sometimes paste-like strokes and clear lines are the influence of the Austrian neo-fauvist New Wild and neo-surrealist art group COBRA, whose works the artist became acquainted with in the 1980s.

Rudi Molacek works with bright, often pure colours. At the same time, they never become overly shouty, nor do they become signal colours. The artist achieves this effect of moderation through a multi-layered technique with which he began experimenting back in the 1990s, when he was working with the then nascent computer graphics software. The software allowed him to create many subtle colour transitions and overlay them on top of each other. Rudi Molacek transfers this practice to the canvas – after applying the main colours, the artist partially scrapes or blurs them with his hands, large brushes or fabrics. The author masterfully works not only with colour transitions and combinations, but also with the texture of the paint layer, achieving a pasty or, on the contrary, perfectly smooth surface.

Rudi Molacek is always extremely attentive to compositional and colouristic balance – the abstract forms are energetic yet complete, and the colours are balanced in their saturation. This provides the works with harmonic clarity and allows the artist to keep the ‘point of maximum’ of aesthetics, not allowing either kitsch or a sense of emptiness to penetrate the canvas.

Curator: Anastasia Volkova.

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