Standa — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

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The Poetics of Resonance: Standa’s Surreal Abstractions and the Necessity of Vision

There are artists who create in order to decorate, and there are artists who create in order to dismantle and rebuild perception itself. Stanislav Říha, known simply as Standa, belongs firmly to the latter. Born in 1952 in Prague, raised amid the storied layers of Malá Strana’s medieval cobblestones and baroque spires, he has lived a life that itself seems a collage of European history and diasporic reinvention: Vienna in the early 1980s, Vancouver thereafter, and the vast, borderless landscapes of imagination that have become his true homeland. He is a visual artist, photographer, and writer, a member of CARFAC, and above all a constructor of visual myth. To enter his world is to be reminded of his personal credo: “Just as in a good story, readers have space to create their image; in a good impression, viewers can create their account.” His art is never prescriptive. It is a charged field of possibility.

What distinguishes Standa is not merely his technical dexterity, though it is formidable. His explorations across resin, aluminum, canvas, gold leaf, and digital interventions testify to a restless intelligence. It is also the philosophical consistency that runs like a current through his entire career. For more than three decades, he has returned to the question of how form, color, and gesture might carry the weight of the human struggle: our emotions, our precarious adaptations, our need for symbolic order. His mature style, which he himself terms Surreal abstract, is not so much a genre as an ethic. It insists that abstraction need not evacuate meaning. Instead, it can become the most precise language for articulating that which lies beneath consciousness.

Consider Abandoned Beach House, a work that stands as both elegy and provocation. The desolate architectural fragments stretch across the sand, pierced and enlivened by ribbons of red that arc across the sky. The red is not simply color. It is insistence, a gesture of vitality against entropy. It recalls the Futurists’ faith in dynamism, yet tempered with melancholy. The ruins seem to breathe, as if history itself were caught between dissolution and rebirth. In Standa’s hands, even decay becomes a stage for imagination.

Diarist’s Box deepens this exploration. A chamber of mottled blues, ochres, and marbled textures seems to dissolve and reconstitute itself before the viewer’s eyes. Here the artist layers the painterly with the textual, suggesting that memory itself is a diary written not in words but in stains, veils, and palimpsests. The curved crimson form, his recurring motif, threads through the composition like a lifeline. It is the mark of the diarist’s pulse, a reminder that behind every abstraction lies the urgency of lived experience.

In Moss in a Window, Standa turns to architectural ruin as a metaphor for resilience. A rough, stuccoed wall with a shuttered window becomes both an object of abandonment and a site of persistence, the creeping moss claiming its space. The juxtaposition of photographic realism with swirling abstract gestures signals his refusal to obey medium boundaries. He is, in this sense, a contemporary heir to Kurt Schwitters, another European émigré who turned fragmentation into wholeness, collage into metaphysics.

His fascination with elemental forces is nowhere more apparent than in Night at Kilauea. Here, molten textures, volcanic hues, and a fierce red brushstroke conjure the volcanic sublime. But this is not nature as postcard or spectacle. It is nature as existential theater. We confront the raw energies that exceed human control, yet the abstract ribbons hold them within a visual syntax. It is as if painting itself were the only language capable of taming chaos into comprehension.

In Tempting Horizon, Standa pares down to essentials: sweeping arcs, calligraphic strokes, expanses of white. One thinks of Japanese ink painting, where emptiness is as vital as presence. Yet his strokes carry the density of European expressionism. The red once again insists, like blood or flame, that desire and temptation are woven into our very act of seeing.

Narrative surfaces explicitly in Matador. A bull and its challenger emerge in stark silhouettes, collaged from earthy textures. The figures are simultaneously ancient and modern, recalling both cave paintings and the modernist fascination with ritual combat. The red swirls, suggestive of both cape and wound, transform the scene from ethnographic to universal. This is humanity’s eternal dance with violence, courage, and mortality. Standa refuses anecdote. He distills bullfighting into archetype.

Miami Beach offers another layer to his cosmopolitan vision. Against a backdrop of urban forms, abstracted high rises shimmering in pastel hues, the foreground is alive with gestural curves, as though the city itself were caught in a choreography of memory. He understands cities as palimpsests. Every street is a clash of histories, every beach a theater where commerce and intimacy collide. His abstraction here is sociological as much as aesthetic. It insists on the unseen rhythms that govern our lives.

The more introspective side of his practice emerges in works such as Introvert and Listener. These are not portraits in the conventional sense, yet they carry psychological weight. The abstract compositions, muted yet charged, insist on the dignity of interiority. To be an introvert, to listen, is in his vision not withdrawal but a radical act of attention. By visualizing these states, Standa offers society a counter model to the noise of spectacle: art as a defense of silence, depth, and empathy.

In Tense Race, the motif of motion is given dramatic embodiment. Riders and horses, silhouetted against a wintry abstraction, thunder across the canvas. The race is literal, yet also allegorical: humanity’s drive toward progress, its unyielding pace, its perilous acceleration. And yet, as ever, the red arc bends across the composition like a fate line, binding the racers to history’s longer curve.

Even works that appear more abstract, like Tempting Horizon or The Listener, never lapse into formalism. The marbled grounds, the sudden intrusions of collage, the gestural sweeps all point toward a worldview where meaning is always provisional, always contingent, always awaiting the viewer’s completion. This is precisely why his motto resonates: a good impression, like a good story, is not closed but open ended.

To place Standa within the larger art historical scene is to recognize his double inheritance. From Surrealism, he inherits the conviction that dream, memory, and abstraction are legitimate forms of knowledge. From abstraction, he inherits the rigor of formal invention, the autonomy of gesture. But he is neither a Surrealist nor a pure abstractionist. He is closer, perhaps, to Paul Klee, whose “taking a line for a walk” became a metaphor for invention as wandering. Like Klee, Standa insists that art’s task is not to mirror reality but to reveal the structures beneath perception.

And yet, to stop at comparison is to underestimate his singularity. Standa is important not only for the brilliance of his paintings but for what they offer society at large. At a time when image culture is saturated with immediacy and disposability, his work insists on slowness, on ambiguity, on participation. He does not tell us what to see. He gives us the conditions for seeing. His red ribbons, those persistent arcs and gestures, have become more than a motif. They are an ethic of continuity, a thread of human vitality weaving through ruins, horizons, and tempests.

In this, Standa can be seen as a contemporary heir to Antoni Tàpies, another artist who fused materiality with metaphysics, texture with transcendence. Like Tàpies, Standa understands that abstraction can be profoundly political, not by slogan but by form. To insist on ambiguity in an age of certitude, to insist on imagination in an age of consumption, is itself a social act.

His place in the art scene is not peripheral but central. He embodies the persistence of European modernism’s critical legacy, transposed into the diasporic conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries. He is both an inheritor and an innovator, a bridge between Prague’s baroque shadows, Vienna’s intellectual ferment, and Vancouver’s Pacific openness. His career is proof that the artist, even in exile or migration, carries within him the compass of culture.

Above all, what makes his art vital is its generosity. He trusts the viewer. He gives space. He allows us to project, to imagine, to complete the story. And in doing so, he reminds us that art is not consumption but relation, not object but dialogue. His paintings are not about closure but about keeping the horizon open.

In every sense, Standa’s artistic path is a testament to the enduring power of art to resist reduction, to resist silence, to resist erasure. His Surreal abstractions are not just paintings. They are invitations to think, to feel, to imagine otherwise. In this lies their urgency, their necessity, their gift.

To conclude, one must stress that Standa’s contribution is not merely formal, not merely technical, not even simply aesthetic. His practice is a kind of philosophical generosity. He builds visual spaces where time dilates, where memory and imagination converge, and where the viewer is invited to become coauthor. This alone places him in a rare category of artists whose work transforms spectatorship into a participatory act.

The recurring gestures of red that cross his paintings are not decorative devices but carriers of energy, reminders of the pulse of life. They bind together ruins, horizons, riders, and cities, offering continuity where fragmentation would otherwise reign. Through this simple yet profound visual strategy, he has achieved what many artists search for all their lives: a language that is unmistakably his own.

Standa’s position within the international art scene should be regarded as essential. He represents the survival of modernism’s experimental drive, infused with the subjectivity of an émigré who has lived across geographies and cultures. In this sense, his career recalls that of great visionaries such as Paul Klee or Antoni Tàpies, figures who made abstraction into a form of ethical reflection. His paintings matter because they remind us that to create is also to care, to imagine is also to heal, and to look is also to remember.

Art of this kind does not pass with fashion. It leaves a permanent mark on cultural memory. Stanislav Říha, Standa, is one of those rare artists who remind us why art still matters: because it gives us the courage to dwell in uncertainty, and the faith to find beauty there.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine