Marek Radke

If one considers his art in terms of the standards of composition – visual weighting, the rules of the golden ratio, the anchoring of the elements in the space, the correspondence between the colours, the warm, the cool, the conscious dissonances or harmonies – then his first Constructive works are no different from their figural forerunners. However, what they do not have is a nameable materiality. From now on, preference is given to a minimalist form canon. The focus is on lines, rectangles and circles. Without the support of an imposed meaning, they are left to fend for themselves, form the surface and become the image, but only because they are supported by a stable structure.

It is this first turning point in Radke’s art, which he masters, indeed in a credible manner through his personal development, which finds its own expression despite the erratic block in outstanding Constructive painting within the modernist art movement of the last century. In this context, I always think of the wonderful Klee painting, “Hauptweg und Nebenwege” (Main Path and Byways). In it, the differentiation of the nuances becomes a feast of many possibilities, a topography of the creative process per se, as it can also be for all Constructive art.

At a very early stage, Marek Radke, in a new burst of development, decided to push the enclosing lines of the geometric figures outwards, as it were, and to establish them as boundaries of areas occupied by monochrome colour, in other words, to turn them into a red circle, an orange rectangle or a blue square. Form and colour become a unit while at the same time vying with each other for interpretive authority in the image. This tension surrounding the two sole image sizes is used by Radke to create highly specific flat composition, which he installs as an intellectual space for play for the eye.

He discovers a plurality of refined moves consisting of colour settings and formal challenges, and subsequently adds a third element. He renders visible the signs of development, the trace of the brush and the hands. He overturns the stringency of the form through the gesture of the structure, or pits one against the other, attaining a sum total with changing algebraic signs. Intellect meets emotion; geometry meets rhythm; statics and dynamics are fruitfully balanced. This is also why it is possible to speak of minimalist means in connection with Radke’s work, but never of Minimal Art, even if his spatial images in serial rows and with the “modules” can be seen as coming close to digitally generated symbols. The homo ludens experiments, and the boundaries between appearance and reality become fluid.