In his work, Thomas Jeppe uses the method of abstract journalism. When collecting research material, the artist, on his journeys across cultural landscape suddenly chances upon a unique picture, object or situation; a symbol full of meanings which immediately announces itself as the goal he was looking for. In this specific reference the form is gradually disengaged from its original context and, based on similarity, connection and randomness, is woven into a net of different forms in a process of aesthetization. This allows for a general reorganization of its potential meanings, purposes and possibilities.

The method applies the aesthetic criterion of fine arts’ validity to the empirical research of cultural studies. It doesn’t strive to eliminate, on the contrary, it stresses ambiguity, inconsistency and divergence. It’s based on the allegoric, emotionally stimulating and communicative. The result is accessible and comprehensible and resonates to such a degree, that it can cross cultural contexts. This is what Jeppe calls productive nihilism or sophism, but his is a thorough and engaged one. It’s a method connecting intuition and passion with intellect; with the underlying message that “to feel” is the only way “to know”. 

Formally, the exhibition Neo-Lad revolves around the theme of dandyism, the struggle with social rules and boredom. More generally, the exhibition is about freedom and release, about delimitation and structure, and embodies artist’s attitude. In his essay Neo-Lad, written for an exhibition about the subculture of Australian “lads”, urban dandies differentiating themselves by a distinctive style of branded sportswear, Thomas Jeppe speaks about the culture of “dancing in the streets”, about the “physical dance of the pirouette of delinquencies, whose partners are authorities, urban environment and history” and whose music is a “chosen inevitability”, a resignation without despair. Jeppe’s project comprises also several copies of paintings by Czech romantic-symbolist painter, Jan Preisler, done by Jeppe himself. The works Jeppe chose were generally Preisler’s late ones characterized by planar emphasis, simplified shapes and a marked intensity of colours. Their over-stylized carelessness stresses a kind of void of the timeless dreamy youth portrayed. 

However, the viewer can only see cuts of it, framed by a diagonal hexagon, a graphic element of a period advertisement depicting the Lucerna building compound from the bird’s eye view, as featured in Václav M. Havel’s book “My Memories”. The hexagon cuts out Preisler’s painting in a restrictive manner, yet it also brings in asymmetric dynamics. The chronologic parallel is further stressed by authentic blow-ups of Australian teenagers at the turn of the millennium and their urban life, which usually means night life. These photographs radiate the feeling of carelessness, yet at the same time of universality. Jeppe also reworked several of Preisler’s posters and accompanied them, just as he accompanied the photographs, by proclamations from the text of Neo-Lad, written this time by hand in Preisler’s Art-Nouveau symbolist font.

The series of lamps formally returns to the motive of the Prague Lucerna, but it’s also a universal symbol of city and night. The symbolic charge, reaching lyrical pathos now and then, is accompanied by craquelures and an overall erosion of motives on panes of glass. The supporting structures, resembling somewhat podiums or gallows, are Jeppe’s own work and are created on the basis of different types of joints, limited by a simple structure of square wooden profile and connecting pegs. Their formal purity and the simplicity of the structure associate an almost immaterial language of signs. Yet a moment later, it falls again into amorphous elasticity of the rubber podium below it.

Formally, Jeppe makes increasingly daring trips into ever wilder areas of unexplored and forbidden aesthetics and more and more complicated and excellent jumps and pirouettes of his own contradictions. Neo-Lad thus becomes an incarnation of Jeppe’s personal artistic attitude.

All works exhibited in the FUTURA Gallery were created during the 6 week production residency in Prague, a part of the A.I.R. FUTURA programme.

Michal Novotný