Vladimír Kokolia: Four Days Refugium
performance/intervention
convent, courtyard
Plasy Monastery 1993
"I wanted to be in Plasy... To rest for a few days. I don't care if it was a performance or not and I don't care that I don't care. It was not about meditation, although I had to meditate out of boredom. But I made there quite a few drawings in my sketch-book about the things which I would have liked to have done for Hermit."
Vladimír Kokolia, 1993
Kokolia "closed" himself in a small dark space hidden under the staircase from the ambit to the courtyard. He stayed in the improvized temporary studio for four days and underwent a special fasting diet, limited to drinking water. After leaving, he donated to the organizers the small sepia-ink drawings on handmade paper, devoted to the topic of the labyrinth. Since the 80s, Kokolia was influenced by the personality and work of the publisher, poet, musician and hermetic Vladimír Zadrobílek alias D. Ž. Bor who published several books in his publishing house Trigon, including "Drawings" (1999), or a set of Twitter lyrics by Vy-já-dření (2015). His painting, drawing, essays, and texts since the early 1980s to the present, testify to his original way of thinking about the general and concrete laws of nature, reality, transcendence, the visible and the invisible. The nature of Kokolia's work within a hermetic and phenomenological context, such as the possible influence of the famous anthology of texts "The Geometry of Alive - Mathematical Models of Morphogenesis" from 1988, could be the subject of a special essay.
Vladimír Kokolia (born November 27, 1956 in Brno) is a Czech painter, printmaker and draftsman, poet and writer. In the years 1984-1997 he was the singer of rock group E, belonging to the Czech alternative and underground music scene. Vladimir Kokolia graduated from the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Uherské Hradiště and later from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Since 1992, he is the Studio Head teacher of Graphics II at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. In 2006, he was appointed Professor. He has many years experience in the Chen Style of Tai Chi Chuan.
