Václav Řezáč – Capturing Chance in Time

Václav Řezáč was born in 1977 in Czechoslovakia. In the 1990s, he began training at the Glass School in Železný Brod. During an exhibition there, he discovered his fascination for an unusual installation by Vladimír Kopecký: broken glass and splashes of color on the floor. In that moment, Řezáč knew he wanted to continue his studies with this artist and professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. “Professor Kopecký’s studio is a school of life where art touches the soul,” Řezáč says enthusiastically about him.

After completing his studies, Václav Řezáč worked on various glass projects. But then he was drawn to Japan. He spent three years teaching at the Toyama City Institute of Glass Art. This stay would have a lasting impact on his artistic work. Many of his vividly colored and mysteriously expressive glass sculptures are inspired by Japanese aesthetics. “I feel the influence of this country in everything I do,” says Václav Řezáč. “For example, how depth, development, and physicality are perceived, the pure and the rough, erosion, dissolution and restraint, chiaroscuro, silence, or delicacy.

For Václav Řezáč, glass is a seductive and at the same time mysterious material. “What fascinates me most is its original liquid state, as it emerges when sand melts at high temperatures.” It is an incredibly thrilling moment, he says, when glass transitions from a liquid to a solid state. In his work, he establishes a relationship between these two states — the result lies somewhere between calculation and chance. The behavior of molten glass on the blowpipe interacts with the cool precision of kiln-cast glass.

Řezáč mixes all the colors for his glass sculptures himself. “This allows me to achieve unique color nuances.” Another key aspect of his work is geometry. “It stands for order and rationality, and it focuses on form,” says the artist. But Václav Řezáč sometimes breaks this order in his pieces. More than that: he intentionally creates a contrast between a geometric body and molten glass by allowing the hot mass to flow over the angular form and envelop it. It is this dialogue between two principles — order and chance — that fascinates him and makes his work so distinctive. “Hot glass has burned its way into my heart,” he emphasizes, affirming his passion for the material.