ARTIST STATEMENT

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 artists of the future.Their life is not going to be easy which we know 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 Tomáš is not creating an illusion of the meeting of Courbet, Signac and Cézanne. The actual painters become 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 the images out.
The scenic qualities of these illusory collages are following up on previous series of paintings with motifs of scenic still life, summer cinemas, theater stages or space in front of a 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 which evokes 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 it 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Construction of these scenes works with literary, historical or art historical references and possibilities of expressing movement and time in 2 dimensional painting.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 so prepared for a collage, for layering and crossing of images, that we are being confused of the rationality and reality that is used in making of Tomáš’s painting. We are surprised to see rational construction, 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 the present state of painting.
                                                                                   Petr Kovář

BIOGRAPHY

Quasiheroes amidst the Pseudoworld

Critical Aspects of Jakub Tomáš’s Paintings

In the Czech arts scene, Jakub Tomáš can be recognized as a distinct painter of the youngest generation, who has succeeded in updating the traditional medium of hanging paintings for the present day. He approaches the canvas as an open living structure which needs to be questioned for its validity to be re-established. The artist has gradually adopted a principle through which he is able to critically approach more general issues and not only the painters’ (understand aesthetic) issues of contemporary painting. Tomáš’s theses generally refer to the ethical aspect of mass reproduced and propagated visuality that eventually not only threatens the artist’s attitude towards art history but also their own work menacing with mutual alienation. What is this principle?

The main question that Jakub Tomáš has asked is what should be painted today and for what reason. How should one penetrate into the present and uncover its character through the newly established forms? He has based his views on the assumption that the vast majority of today’s visuality is mediated analogously or digitally, i.e. ready to use, including such areas as painting and its thematic bases. Image (especially the photographic one) has become a generally “accessible” material. Accessibility devalues visuality in terms of information, which in itself is already a reduced lingual or data structure. If an image really is to format the present, then it cannot just manifold and mechanically, no matter how brilliantly, multiply themes, motives and genres, which have already been circulating around both physically and virtually. However, it is possible to thematize this “circulation” as such and uncover its neurasthenic aspects. Recycling the visuality in circulation provokes questions. Why does it occur and what is its cause? This issue, which has originally been an external factor in painting, has attracted Jakub Tomáš’s attention and he thematizes it with all the vigour and radicality attainable through his means of expression.

The key moment lies in the relationship of the recycled images-templates (digitally spread models) as raw material and their reflections in new or newly composed image forms (the artist’s mental operations). The appropriated elements of visuality are used as building material for the new architecture of the painting. These “architectural” relationships are artistically evoked in a way to negate the level of automatic statement, suppress the information role of the templates and become a painterly quality in themselves within the scope of visually mediated reference. In other words, Jakub Tomáš fully uses the painterly means to comment, using metaphorical examples, on general events which constitute but also manipulate and obscure our present.

The principal motif of Tomáš’s paintings is the unmasking of painterly illusion achieved by purposely selected means. He disempowers the role of objectivity (but also of digital templates!) by literally acknowledging it as substitutionary. Cut-outs of figures, situation settings, mock-ups of objects, construction kit parts, paper boxes, table boards, paper pads, skewers, scissors, glue etc. appear in the paintings. Figuration representatives remain in a playful, model association plane and suppress the automatically appearing plausible semantic connotations. At the same time, the DIY procedures through which the quasi-objects-heroes are created are acknowledged.

On the one hand, all the images composed of substitutionary figuration can be perceived as still life compositions, in which, however, there is something inappropriate, subversive and almost irritating (palimpsest). On the other hand, the images are the result of the artist’s abstract mental operations assembled following a specific pattern. In such inconsistency the basic methodical tools of art science fail, it is hard to establish the line between objectivity and abstract expression; it is not even possible to speak about collage, even though the works are methodically close to it. It evidently is the artist’s conceptual plan. Objectivity is dematerialized while the author’s critical thinking materializes by getting specific outlines. In such dialectically set conditions for expression a lively social topic can be uncovered without this effort turning into a one-dimensional illustration of circumstances, banal moralizing or kitsch.

While the individual components of the painting may evoke a collage-like feeling, they are internally organized according to painting composition principles which often take on a further semantic role relating to the theme. Composition as the presentation of a model (Female Guard, 2014; Museum, 2015), composition as the demonstration of motif multiplication (Kimono, 2013; How to Act and Stand Properly While Shooting with Bow and Arrow, 2014), composition as a dynamic rotating element (s. 25 NÁZEV DATACE, The Cymbal Player, 2014), as a space model (Staircase, 2015; Eroticon, 2015; Box, 2015), as a portrait-paraphrase of an existing template from art history (Slavoj and Záboj, 2016; Záboj and Slavoj, 2015; Lumír and Song, 2016), composition as a backdrop storage (Figural Still-life, 2013) as ornament (Sebastian, 2015), wallpaper (The Headscarf, 2015) etc. Even here, the author’s palimpsest can be mentioned as an expression of visual intertextuality.

It is a method leading to fusion or to the dissolution of genres; a dirty painting discipline, which besides false, substitutionary figuration, opens a field for dynamic cultivation of relationships that do not occur among the representatives of the objective world but among their acknowledged substitutes which turn into phantoms in this manner. In the works of Jakub Tomáš, it is not history that is brought back to life but its chimeras (Přemysl and Libuše, 2016), not animals but their mock-ups (Rider, 2015; Still-life with Horse, 2015) or prefabricated logos (Ferrari, 2015; Horses, 2015). A “still life” can be both a “multiple figure” composition (Shooting, 2015; Figural Still Life, 2013) and a composition of crumbling letters which verbally present still life (Still life, 2013). The traditional theme of Christian iconography – “Annunciation” – has become a playful adaptation, in a theatrical setting, pseudo figures on the background of a store with a curtain placed into a spatially illusory format, the shape of which evokes a comics speech bubble or a painter’s palette. The painting False Light (2015) is just as ironic. In a staged situation with a mirror and its reflection the author accentuates the reality of the mirror and the artificiality of the figural backdrop further enhanced by the relationship between artificial (lamp) and natural (window) light which is reflected and refracted in the mirror. The paradoxes offered are even more apparent in compositions with unequivocally social vertones. For instance, in the canvas Capital (2013) the scene is dominated by a large company logo in front of which there are two figure mock-ups of managers split between a festive and working uniform while carving a third, female, figurine with some attribute of honour. Even though the narrative aspect of the image remains unclear, the exaggerated artificiality and arrangement of the scene still manage to evoke the portentousness in the “still life” associated with acts in the name of the mentioned economic notion. In the painting Procession (2015), object contours are dissolved through the fragmentation of the motif. In the current state it is not clear what the original model depicted, what information it brought and what it was supposed to present. Tomáš’s painting perfectly demonstrates what visual prefabrication is and how it also falls victim to its own reflection. Paradoxically, an ornamental aspect, very similar to the paintings and sculptures of the late Socialist Realism era in which the ideologically commissioned theme would become a non-commital, empty ornament, appears. The lexical or literary reflections of this problem can be found in the work Die Sonne (2014).

The artist’s chronological and literary games Cézanne in front of Mánes (2014), Good morning, Mr. Cézanne, Courbete, Signac (2013) and Sasnal like Mánes (2014) are crucial. The backdrops of figures of prominent world artists of the past and present meet the Czech ones. Their encounters are just as absurd as in other works of this artist. Césanne is not standing in front of the Mánes building in Prague as the title would suggest but in a book about Josef Mánes. The author sees art history from the point of view of an active artist, for whom chronology is not as important as the legacy of distinct art personalities and the detailed study of their work. Paraphrasing masterpieces of art history (Good morning, Mr. Cézanne, Courbete, Signac, 2013) ironically reduces art history to the “best moments” and transforms them into an ironic pedantic grotesque, a jaunty “Crib” on a pupil’s desk. Sasnal like Mánes (2014) refers to the incompatibility of art history criteria of different eras and styles. How should today’s art be compared and assessed in relation to what had already taken place and is now concealed in the codex of history? Perhaps by regularly changing the view of all history and assessing it through today’s optics and therefore always being amidst a permanently ongoing transformation process.

In his works, Jakub Tomáš primarily points out the fact that today it is possible to artistically handle both history, which materializes and deadens art, and the flood of visual and information data smog, which alters the human consciousness and takes away the human ability to think and create independently. He perceives painting as a demonstration frame for uncovering contradictory phenomena. He “creates” his own extras, backdrops and scenery. This self-sufficiency is fundamental. It allows the painter to differentiate between reality and game, metaphorically speaking, the face and the mask, while using both at the same time. For a world of the “post media situation” this differentiation is one of the fundamental issues (production and postproduction of schemes, revivals, remixes and clichés). The unstructured generally accessible visuality spread by the internet and media represents a global ecological disaster for the human consciousness; besides the positive aspects, it also generates lots of negative phenomena which defy both individual and collective control systems.

Petr Vaňous