Ivan Ouhel focuses on the landscape, a theme that is quite common in Czech art, he has never considered it a mere visual sensation but rather as the space of human memory, an event and a process. This was made clear by his very first exhibition staged a year after he graduated. Ouhel soon disrupted the detachment between the artist and his model, i.e. a section of the landscape, and advanced into the heart of the landscape as a manifestation of nature. He did not want to touch a defined form, a topographically localised place, but sought instead to understand nature's organising forces. The fundamental element is therefore energy, manifested in Ouhel's work by color, which builds up the space of the picture through the strength of emotion. Ouhel's work of 1976-77 shows how strongly he felt the need to understand the role of color in the process of creating a picture.
From the figure, Ouhel turned his attention to new paintings parrying the processes of nature. His paintings evoked less and less his own ideas about objects in the world; he did not state or explain anything, he did not mislead anyone with his own ideas about the world, but instead carefully explored how it appears,. His pictures are not produced in a system of fixed ideas or views but in constant change, the newness of the creation of nature. For him, the world is not a phenomenon given once and for all in notions of discoursing reason, but it is continually created, and as such is revealed and made visible by painting. It is through painting, not relections clothed in notions, that Ivan Ouhel touches reality.