“I still do recall experiences from my childhood, and not only deeply human experiences but also experiences of places, experiences of nature related to the specific landscape of Vestín, its shape and composition, and the constant variability of light and color. I’m still working with those impressions today… I’m always thinking about the viewer and how I can evoke those feelings that go back to the free atmosphere of my youth.
…I was fascinated by the light and color properties of glass. Once I got into the glassmaking environment, I quickly realized that the material inspired me so much that I wanted to work with it for a long time. Optical glass, which I’ve worked with since the 1950s, is a material through which one can peer into the mystery of the universe on both a macro and a micro level, discovering things that had been hidden up to that point. For me, it reveals a world made unique with new shapes, light, and colors. Glass is a magic material, and in a certain sense a spiritual one. Glass is at once tangible and intangible. Like man, it is both material and spiritual. It has mass and yet it defies mass. Pure like water, transparent like air, it is thought and reality bringing into doubt our sensorial experience and at the same time enriching it with a new understanding. Glass is a box, an envelope, a tool, a mediator, a memory.
… Glass is the most imaginative material that man has ever created. The presence of glass in a human space conditions not only the space itself but also an as the user. Glass is for me a pretext for expressing a different spatial and emotional perception of the world. A perception made unique by the optical means offered by this material, as well as by the new possibilities for using it in space… in glass, there’s the authenticity of the material, the discovery that it has uncommon optical and material properties, such as malleability. Glass by itself is a sufficient source of inspiration.”
This is what Václav Cigler says about his own work. A gifted (Glass) artist/sculptor who uses glass and light to make the most beautiful minimal objects possible. publication available at www.ftn-books.com
