The exhibition draws inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous quote: “And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” (Beyond Good and Evil) Here, the motif of the abyss has been replaced by the figure of the Devil, whose severed head we see in Vytisk’s painting of the same name, The abyss gazes also into you. The phenomenon of the abyss is also characteristic of Janovský, who works extensively in his art with deceptive personal and collective memory—that is, the unhealed abyss between distorted memories and forgotten reality. The fading of memories goes hand in hand with the flaking and crumbling of the slowly collapsing architecture of the end of totalitarian regimes. The collapse of socialism is drawn into parallel with the social decadence of the crumbling Roman Empire. The origin of the term “decadence” is derived precisely from the Latin “decadere,” meaning to fall and decline.

For Janovský, the pathology of dictatorship is also reflected in a series of Nazi concentration camps built from the blocks of a children’s construction set. The image of the abyss then shifts to the motif of mass graves, from which the stares of murdered victims—who were left unassisted—pierce us. In his ink drawings and collages, the artist captures places without a soul and souls without a body—that is, ghostly pale beings that could be just as much a faded memory as a spirit or a phantom from another century. The chasm here thus encompasses not only spatial distance but also temporal distance. Echoes of the past from one era (Janovský’s anemic, concrete Czechoslovakia and Vytiska’s Wallachian village folklore) collide with an alienated present, foreshadowing the possible end of humanity.

In these works, we can observe a connection to the psychoanalytic tradition. While Janovský’s work features the shared memory of Jung’s collective unconscious, Vytiska’s work features Lacan’s split subject. This concept refers to a fragmented human identity that is internally divided and never fully understands itself. On his canvases, Vytiska depicts a demonic sacra conversazione of several contradictory archetypes—rural children, devils, skeletons, wolf and goat people, personifications of dying and reborn nature, and more. These represent the profoundly fractured human personality, split into several separate and mutually conflicting parts. All are driven by a strong yet insatiable desire for something unspoken, which they compensate for with hedonistic and destructive behavior, such as gluttony and alcoholism, arson, witchcraft, necromancy, etc.

While the devil is more of a charismatic anti-hero in Vytiska’s work, akin to Goethe’s Mephistopheles, in Janovský’s work the concept of the devil is not meant literally, but rather as a metaphor for human depravity and our inner shadow. The devil staring into us as if into an abyss represents our repressed neuroses and memories of a childhood that was not always happy. Janovský finds Satan in the twists and turns of negative personality traits, whereas Vytiska understands him as the untamable black horse of desire from Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, which leads us to amoral behavior.

Another important theme for both artists is the aforementioned children. Here, the child is a being not yet integrated into the principles of morality, rationality, and social rules. In Vytiska’s work, children are magnetically drawn to hedonism, devil worship, destruction, and death. Instead of embodying innocence, he portrays them as a memento of original sin: “For no one is free from sin before you, not even an infant,” (St. Augustine, Confessions) In Janovský’s conception, children are not bearers of bad qualities, but rather their “lightning rod.” They are primarily timid, lonely, and misunderstood—much like the young Franz Kafka in his Letter to His Father. In other words, in Vytiska’s work, children are the sources of evil, while in Janovský’s, they are its recipients.

Nietzsche once spoke of the “twilight of the gods,” but today, with faith in the gods gone, only twilight remains. In the exhibition, this is transformed into the artistic motif of darkness, night, and black. In his painting Enlightenment, Vytiska transposes the tenebristic atmosphere of the Baroque artist Georges de La Tour into the pitch-black room of a log cabin. The figure of the goat-headed Lucifer holding a candle contrasts with the all-encompassing darkness, even though, paradoxically, it is broad daylight outside. Janovský created a noir series of nocturnes, where blackness, like the dead river Lethe, flows around the vanitas of old, broken, and useless objects. Glasses with a broken lens, rusty buckets, a dying birthday candle, a broken feather—all point to the fragility and transience of things, and thus of life, but also to the beauty of this transience. In this artistic dialogue, Janovský’s industrialization of the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware blends with Vytiska’s play on pagan ritual intertwined with the theme of Kubrick’s horror film *em* *The Shining* . Rooted in the intellectual tradition of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, Vytiska perceives the world through gloomy films and B-movie pop culture, which serve as a window into the subconscious of our society. He shares a fondness for the symbol of the malevolent eye with Odilon Redon, though in his case it is an eyeball protruding from its socket. Perhaps it is precisely this devilish eye that sees best the abyss deep within us…

curator: Kamil Princ