Jakub Tomáš: Inventory

Jakub Tomáš (1982), a recent graduate from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (2006 – 2012, prof. Vladimír Kokolia, prof. Jiří Sopko) has been appearing regularly in the Czech arts scene as a distinct painter, who is able to update the present for painting in his own particular manner. Just around the time of his graduation, his works were selected by Karel Srp for the Start Up exhibition cycle, by which the Prague City Gallery presents the living impulses of the youngest Czech art to the public. Already then, we were able to note the artist’s exceptional abilities: a free and yet not autotelic approach to the painter’s means of expression, a sense for new formatting of the painting corresponding with the changing human conscience, a mastery of painting illusion, which can be exposed by being altered and in this way, a range of issues which surpass the narrow borders set up by one artistic discipline can be brought up.

By writing that Jakub Tomáš “updates the present for painting” we primarily refer to the fact that his works are based on and stem from the existing relationships between the human conscience and reality which is reflected and permanently renewed by this conscience in order to point out any ambiguities, mistakes, errors and lies which appear in this reality and which introduce contradictions between the true knowledge and false being. By this, conscience itself is being altered and made more acute. It gets rid of delusion as well as self-delusion and sharpens its critical tools to generalize this experience and give testimony about it. The output of this whole process of “thinking through the experiencing of creation” is, in the case of Jakub Tomáš, a painting for which not obscuring anything is characteristic. On the contrary, the artist is working towards exposing the means of expression and painting strategies in order to better and more accurately find contradictions which can be found in evoked painting relationships and constellations (and analogically anywhere else). This is not the case of a priori perception but contrarily of a systematic decomposition of image, subject and data conventions and of targeted deepening of the contradiction in the perception of the painted surface of the artwork. That is also the reason why Tomáš’s painting ever more resembles a collage, even though we become more and more certain of the fact that it is not a collage. More accurately, it is its illusory metaphor. The constitution of the artwork in itself, the principle through which the painting conveys its messages, is “collaged”. And this “unity in contradiction” seems to open our eyes which had grown used to not passing on the information about what they can see. The separation of seeing and conscience arising from the reflection on what is seen remains the main subject of Tomáš’s paintings.

The exhibition title Inventory refers to the process used in trade and business – taking an inventory or randomly checking the current assets, an evidence of thing (in this case images or motifs) in the form of an exhibition. The exhibition then becomes one of the infinite sample possibilities of what the inventory workers (author and curator) have separated, exhibited and which is, at the same time, “checked” by the visiting public before the paintings are put away again according to the location and needs of their owner.

Petr Vaňous, independent curator (text adapted from Revue Art 2/ 2015)