Silence is a deceptive substance in Peter Nikl's conception. Imperceptible, almost conciliatory, and yet it is in it that almost anything can happen. In the eponymous exhibition of his oil paintings, which date back to the covid year 2019, but most of them are anchored in the present, this artist unexpectedly juxtaposes three seemingly unrelated cycles. What unites all the paintings, however, is a process that takes place outside the noise of the everyday, and which Petr Nikl allows to emerge on pure abstract surfaces. These are not an aesthetic finesse for him, as they function as an emotive yet neutral space in which the motif can concentrate into its purest form.

The colourful paintings of flowers and butterflies act as records of organic metamorphosis. Orchids sometimes resemble fantastical creatures that are just deciding whether to take root or take flight. Butterflies, on the other hand, carry with them the story of a caterpillar giving up one existence to enter another. In both cases, it is a moment in between, a stage when the shape is not yet definitive and silence is a necessary condition for growth.

Contrasting this colourful vitality are the black and white portraits of children. Their silver-grey palette is not just a reference to the old family photographs on which Petr Nikl painted them. It is also the colour of time, which is stored in memory as a sediment of light and shadow. The pictures were taken by his father in the mid-1960s, when Petr Nikl was five. He first began painting self-portraits from his childhood in 1992, when he was thirty-two, and now - three decades later - he is returning to them with renewed intensity. The second group consists of paintings of his own children, who, paradoxically, appear on the canvases older than their father in archival photographs. Here, time does not linearly arrange itself, but is stacked in layers that both complement and subvert each other.

The paintings' monochromatic settings create a strange tension. The realistically elaborate motif emerges from the abstract field as if from a fog that both emphasizes and conceals it. One is subconsciously forced to concentrate, to slow down, to quiet down internally. And it is in this state that the real theme of the entire exhibition, which is transformation, emerges. The transformation of the forms of a biological organism, the transformation of a child into an adult, the transformation of a visual memory into an image, the transformation of time into colour.

Nickel's Silence is therefore paradoxically full of movement - it is a space where things change precisely because nothing prevents their subtle transformation. And maybe that's the point of the whole exhibition. Although one cannot see the silence, one can realize how the world is subtly rearranging itself and changing its form.

curator: Radek Wohlmuth