Rajlich, who studied sculpture in the 1950s, made geometric yet figuratively influenced sculptures in metal and Plexiglas sheets until 1968. In 1966, he was in the cradle of Klub Konkretistu, the Czech counterpart of the then already disbanded international Zero group (including Otto Piene and Gunther Uecker) and the Dutch Zero movement (including Jan Schoonhoven and Henk Peeters). These artists created impersonal and monochrome works, focusing on light and movement, as a response to the informal expression that dominated the post-war European art world.
After leaving Russian-occupied Prague for the Netherlands in 1969, Rajlich turned to painting. He initially worked in the port of Rotterdam and later taught in The Hague, where he lived until he returned to Prague in around 2010. Rajlich believes that painting should be concrete rather than mimetic. He started to make horizontal and vertical line compositions with ink. Herein lay the seed for the grid that would become a foundation for his paintings. The grid enabled him to restrict his images to the surface, achieve a unified picture plane, and find an appropriate relationship to colour.
Rajlich states that he was influenced by Op Art during this period. An affinity could certainly be seen in the 1970s, although Rajlich’s work was less systematic and not as strictly geometric. He initially drew the grid onto a monochrome canvas. He also tried to eliminate the spatial depth between grid and background by colouring the individual squares. Later, he reversed the construction of his canvases and painted over the grid, first in thin, transparent layers and subsequently in thicker ones. The artist said that “everything that happens in a painting should only take place on its surface”, an idea that he shared with many contemporaneous painters. In the ‘Fundamentele schilderkunst’ [Fundamental Painting] exhibition in Amsterdam (1975), Rajlich’s canvases hung alongside works by Robert Ryman, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Brice Marden and Gerhard Richter, amongst others.
The systematic examination of technical processes and the building blocks of painting is central to fundamental painting: brushstroke, line, form, structure and texture, colour, paint and canvas. Although Rajlich adhered to this less dogmatically than others, the radical exclusion of all forms of spatiality led him to create a black, monochrome, square painting in 1979. Rajlich painted gold-coloured canvases in the early 1980s. The grid survived but was drawn onto the painted surface in faint pencil lines. Rajlich always left one or more edges of the canvas unpainted as this was the only way to ensure a completely smooth painted surface. He subsequently painted monochrome canvases in a wider colour palette. The unpainted edges were still evident but the grid had now disappeared. The emphasis came to lie more on the structure of the paint skin, into which he later scratched lines with brushes or his bare hands. He occasionally incorporated reflective materials into the pigment to enhance the luminosity and colour.
Rajlich is ultimately an artist who creates sensitive works that hover between a grid and free painterly gestures, who evolved slowly on the fringes of the major stylistic movements of his time, developing from an optical painter, via fundamental art to a pictorial artist. He increasingly came to focus on the subject matter of painting.
