CGD

Everything important is in the sketchbook and Janíček keeps sketching incessantly. You actually cannot spot him not sketching. This obsession is important. Here they come more and more of those sketches, which are thus increasingly visible. The recent years perhaps have not seen as fertile an illustrator as this. Is this the goal and the destiny? Janíček's subjects span such a wide range that the author, jumping back and forth between the past and the future, keeps forgetting about the present; and indeed, he only rarely comments on the latter. He is rather an archive keeper of forgotten family archives, carelessly dropped and trampled comics and hollowed landscapes. Not to mention that he does not quite fit into the Czech territory anyway, being more a member of the family of illustrators occupying the New Yorker magazine covers: there is always more of the American than the Czech in his work. Is there really so little space here, is it really what we lack so heavily? Is it in the distance? Distance, however, is not the only thing present in his drawings. This seeking space perhaps merely answers the question why Janíček's production is so vast. It can also be that it is based on nostalgia over the times when one could well do with a pencil and a screwdriver.

Tomáš Luňák