JAKUB TAJOVSKY

For Jakub Tajovský, a materialistic and processual approach to artistic creation is essential. His work is a kind of simulated geology - the author is the one who controls the technology to give way to the conflicting influences that shape the final form of the work. He breaks down the painting medium into primary factors, with which he plays and reaches counterintuitive conclusions. He mixes his own painting materials and explores the visual manifestations of their chemical reactions. It uses the precision of paint application machines. He affixes the pigment of ink-jet printers to his materials, etc.

The creation of an image is a dialectic: a synthesis of exact procedures and unpredictable processes that determine each other. In his work, there is naturally a contradiction between the natural and the artificial, the exact and the random, the technological and the geological.

      Even the title of the exhibition is a paradox that refers to the core of his interest. The landscape here is neither natural nor artificial, but synthetic, which can be understood as a merging of both opposites. Nature is invented by human activity, while it itself is the co-author of its image.
      If we talk about the invention of nature, we mean the invention of relationships and mutual influences.
A composition that puts itself into slow motion. That's why Jakub Tajovský covers the grid with moss and has it irrigated by a system powered by a solar power bank. Therefore, his paintings are supplemented with objects in the stalactite/stalagnate system. That is why he assembles a micro-panorama of objects created by casting, mixing and layering, which resemble artificial stones... He considers paintings as networks that distribute matter, resources and forces, so it is not only what takes place on them that is important, but also what happens between them. Because when inventing a landscape, it is not enough to invent a rock, but also all the surrounding formations and forces that constantly shape it.
      The exhibition can be understood as a transition from the macro-scale to the micro-world. In the first room with like
we find observers in a bird's eye view. We see a painting of the moon, which due to its scale becomes a landscape, and dioramas seen as a whole from a distance. In the second space, we observe an artificial ecosystem in the form of the already mentioned irrigated grid with moss and a stalactite diptych. We are here in the middle of systems and geological formations. In the following corridor and room, there are paintings filled with human-scale objects, for which a common detail is similar to polished marble referencing geological memory and the theme of tools and materials that excite the visual imagination. In the last room with a low circular vault, we are observers of a microworld of fragments, small objects and small-format paintings, which are material variations on the diagonal. We thus move across the model of artificial nature, which in order to function needs both macro-scale, planetary processes and large events, and microscopic interaction at the level of simple animals and chemicals. At the same time, however, this exhibition does not aim to be an exact model. This is primarily research into materials with synesthetic results, for which the viewer's feeling and empathy are sufficient to understand to a certain extent.

 

 

curator: Jozef Mrva Jr.