These paintings of Kačmarek allow us to recognize the scope of that whole tradition of animalistic painting up to the present day, placing his own cow in the center; in this case, tied to a large stone so that it cannot move or move away, motionless while dominating both the surface of the canvas and the gallery space with the direct gaze of a deeply human beast. Like the young ox of Paul Potter o to the cow of Mark Tansey. We look at each other.
Something similar occurs in a series of canvases centered on a robust ram, a pair of distracted roe deer, a hen with a worm just plucked from the earth, a partridge and even an eagle. All of them are central figures that define the theme, with an immediate presence that stands out against a circumstantial background landscape: a meadow, crop fields, a farm, the countryside or perhaps a forest hinted at in the distance, always under stormy skies that create a charged atmosphere, with a damp light and a dense and mysterious air.
Ricardo Forriols
Polytechnic University of Valencia
