Jaroslav Vančát (born on 27th February,1949 in Benešov near Prague)
is an artist, visual media theorist and associate professor. He graduated from the Secondary Technical School of Film in Čimelice (1964 – 68). He also graduated from the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Charles University in Prague in Art (and Czech) under Miroslav Lamač and Zdeněk Sykora (1968 – 1974). He received his postgraduate PhDr in Art Criticism at the Department of Aesthetics from the same faculty (1981 – 83) and doctorate PhD from the Department of Media Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University (2007). Since 2010 he has been an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, where he co-created the concept of the Creative Module (externally since 1992, internally since 1997), externally at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and at the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Design and Art, the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. He is the author of two monographs – Creating Visual Imaging (Karolinum 2000) and The Development of Image from Object to Interactivity (Karolinum 2009) as well as many art-theoretical and art-pedagogical texts. He has also been the curator of a number of exhibitions, such as “Czech Electronic Picture” in Mánes in 1994, “World as a Structure, Structure as a Picture” in the Klatovy / Klenová Gallery in 2003. He created one of the first Czech video installations, “Dialogues” (1988).
Under the influence of his lecturer Zdeněk Sýkora, he has been working on the depiction of an excess of pictorial elements in his art since the 1980s. He considers this topical today, as much as a portrait, landscape or still life was topical in history, in order to clarify a new attitude to reality under the influence of contemporary impulses. He understands the images he creates depict reality – they can prepare us to perceive the complex compositions of relationships and contexts into which we are increasingly introduced in the arrangement of language and communication and help us understand the complex processes in new technologies, biology, anthropology and sociology. Curator Jan Van Woensel believes the artist is attempting in his paintings to portray such phenomena as the connectivity of pixels, their coordination and the resulting clusters, as well as the structural levels of the image, metastructures and their transformations, leading to interactivity as a new attitude to the image, alongside the traditional “realistic” representation and the already established classical non-figurative art. Unlike Zdeněk Sýkora, for whom the computer became an optional support tool, Vančát’s creations are no longer possible without the use of digital image media.
