Built for hugging, the Care Bears spent Ready or Not dodging the eye, in a show of diamond paintings, glazed reliefs and reworked suitcases by Ondřej Kotrč at Cejla in Brno.
Ondřej Kotrč moves between painting, objects and installation, drawn to colour, light and material and to motifs lifted from popular culture and its subcultures. Born in Havlíčkův Brod in 1982, he graduated from Petr Kvíčala's Painting Studio 3 in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology, and he treats the making, craft and accidents included, as part of the work. Ready or Not ran at Cejla, an independent, artist-run gallery in Brno for emerging Czech and international artists, from 18 September to 21 October 2026, with a text by the curator, Risto Ilič.
The title is the seeker's call at the end of the count. The Care Bears held to the margins and blind spots, and the difficulty was less finding them than reading them. Frightened, in trouble, or just not interested in company? The materials kept the question open. Surfaces gleamed, bent the light, muddled depth and shifted from smooth to rough, so the eye kept flipping between figure and substance. Ilič puts it this way: "What is supposed to be visible sometimes behaves almost like camouflage."
Nowhere was that flipping more literal than in a pair of diamond paintings. The technique builds a picture from tiny plastic diamonds, a slow method meant to sharpen it point by point. Kotrč got the opposite: the figure sank into the glossy field and lost its edges, and the glitter meant to lift the image broke it apart. Patience, normally the route to clarity, became a way of losing the subject.
The suitcase works moved the hiding from the figure onto the object. Their reliefs hugged the moulded shell of a mass-produced case until found object and Kotrč's own hand were hard to tell apart. In the relief diptych even the setting would not settle. Cave, waterfall, fire, bush: no motif held to a single role, and glossy, almost liquid glazes ran up against matte, sandblasted passages. The bears inside were neither safely at home nor clearly at risk, stuck in a scene still making up its mind.
Elsewhere, hiding hardened into refusal. One bear, its back turned, vanished behind a black sun that took up almost all of the picture. A black figure hung from a colourful lightning bolt, plain to see, its situation anything but plain: clinging on, falling, or riding the strike. Nothing here was simply absent. Kotrč dosed out presence with care, enough to register, never enough to settle anything.
Humour came in sideways. Inside a translucent piece shaped like a glass block, a glossy bear stood on a cloud and peed downwards, a small absurd scene the material made almost decorative, even luxurious. In Ilič's words: "Pathos can collapse into a gag in a matter of seconds, and cuteness can reveal itself as a rather peculiar form of cheekiness." Shifts of scale, surface, setting and visibility wore the familiar bear down until it stopped being self-evident, an odd fate for a character designed to be read at a glance.
