Installation view/ STAFFAGE OF THE PRESENCE, 2014, OFFformat gallery, Brno

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  STAFFAGE OF THE PRESENCE | 2014

The painting named Good Day Mr. Coubert, Signac and Cézanne! paraphrases the famous painting by the author of the Realistic Manifesto. The bourgeoisie whose attention and appreciation is Courbet calling for is Tomáš substituting for painters – followers. The perspective is changing the artist is greeting the artists to come. Their life is not going to be easy which we know now with our experience one hundred fifty years later. We think we are looking at a figural composition but we are actually looking at a still life or figural still life. The illusory painting by Jakub Tomas is not creating an illusion of the meeting of Courbet, Signac and Cézanne. The painters are becoming information, meanings and imaginations which could be modeled in space. Jakub is constructing a mental space as a scene for which our attention is cutting out images. The scenic qualities of these illusory collages is following up on previous series of paintings with motifs of scenic still life, summer cinemas, theater stages or space in front of the blackboard. Painting is the space that is used to be exhibited on. In the series of paintings from years 2010 and 2013 he is amplifying the spectator’s view by round formats of paintings. The shape of the canvas is adjusting to the roundness of human eye’s view and theatrically transfers into the view from the opera glass. The motif of construction and mainly the construction from the building material referring to the phenomenon of gadgetry has recently successfully infiltrated into all art regions. Jakub in his own way is also being affected by this trend when he is as a young modeller cutting the photography material, gluing to the cardboard and cutting again and placing them into the scene with other objects to create a model for the final painting. We get an arranged or accidental section of a world of stacking reproductions, cardboard and sticks, the image of the reality. Construction of the scenes works with literary, historical or art historical references and possibilities of expressing movement and time in 2 dimensional painting. The realism of the scenes (the things we could really hit or objects we could really hold) paradoxically deepens the feeling of unreality. The painting though is in all cases being developed from something concrete (the image of a man, practical manual, realistic depiction, the painting of the whole). We are being confused by the rationality and reality that is used in making of Tomáš’s paintings. We are prepared for collage, for layering and crossing of images, spatial perspective and shadows of figures. The paper paintings or the objects for the series “Inspection of the Crime Scene” could be also considered part of this game. The author is depicting different visions of the places where crime occurred by using the classical method of painting that is continuously changing under the angle of the viewer into a different painting. Staffage of the presence is a critical assessment of the phenomenon of reality by using painting tools and a humorous comment about a painting presence. Petr Kovář