Clear Body

In Clear Body (alternatively Bright Body or Light Body; originally titled Corps clair), Šíma transformed the human figure into an immaterial sign suffused with light, moving across the picture plane between apparition and disappearance. The elongated form emerges from a luminous environment almost weightlessly: the body dissolves into translucent layers of colour, its presence sustained primarily by a delicate, intermittently broken network of contour lines. Here, drawing does not define a fixed shape but records its transformation, as though capturing several moments of the same body simultaneously, between its emergence and subsequent vanishing. In doing so, Šíma returned to the motif of the levitating torso familiar from his pre-war work, but by the mid-1960s he had stripped it of its former heaviness, transforming it into a translucent apparition whose significance shifted from corporeality towards the idea of an inner light. In the wider group of paintings created in 1966, this motif intersects with the themes of the labyrinth and the figure of Ariadne, lending the torso an additional significance as a sign capable of guiding a person out of the enclosed space of wandering.

The painting occupies the boundary between figuration and the recording of a phenomenon, between the body and its memory. This very instability reflects Šíma’s understanding of painting at the time as a space for poetry, freedom and spiritual exploration. Clear Body therefore does not represent a return to the figure in the traditional sense, but rather its late transformation into a pictorial trace of a human being no longer confined within corporeal matter, but becoming part of light and space.

The work was originally owned by the Paris gallery Le Point Cardinal, which had represented Šíma since the 1960s. The work was assessed during consultations with Prof. J. Zemina and Mgr. Ch. Zimová of the Josef Šíma Foundation. An expert opinion by PhDr. K. Srp is attached.

Reproduced in:

·     V. Linhartová: Joseph Sima: ses amis, ses contemporains, Brussels, 1974, p. 110

·     L. Bydžovská / K. Srp: Josef Šíma – Návrat Theseův, Prague, 2006, p. 146, fig. 130

Exhibited:

·     Joseph Sima. OEuvres anciennes et récentes 1923–1965, Galerie Le Point Cardinal, Paris, 22 March – 30 April 1966; exhibition documented in the gallery archive, although the work was not listed in the catalogue

·     Josef Šíma: Obrazy a kresby, National Gallery in Prague, 22 May – 23 June 1968; Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava, July–August 1968; Moravian Gallery in Brno, August–September 1968, cat. No. 168

·     Joseph Sima, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris, 7 November – 30 December 1968, cat. p. 107, fig. 123

·     Sima – Le Grand Jeu, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 3 April – 21 June 1992, cat. p. 163, fig. 114

·     Josef Šíma, National Gallery in Prague, Prague Castle Riding School, 9 July – 13 September 1992, cat. No. 114

·     Joseph Sima – Peintures et oeuvres sur papier, Galerie L’Or du Temps and Galerie Les Yeux Fertiles, Paris, 27 May – 2 July 2005