Jakub Hubálek
Jakub Hubálek is one of the distinctive painting solitaires of the youngest artistic generation. He entered the Czech art scene in 2010, when he graduated from the Prague Academy of Fine Arts in the Drawing Studio. The relationship with this medium is also fundamental to his author's conception of the image, and it is on this relationship that all the essential specificities that make his painterly expression exceptional and recognizable are based. The orientation towards black and white tonality, to which he worked his way through green monochromes, is balanced by the author within the framework of the pictorial constitution with a sense of contrast of forms. On the one hand, descriptiveness on the border of the cited photographic model, on the other, impulsive expressive inputs that dismantle descriptiveness in its perfect illusiveness. The tension between the two poles of expression (precision vs gesture) creates a world of changing, contradictory atmosphere, behind which we feel the ambivalent view of an introvert. Somewhere rather critical, elsewhere sober, but often subversively subversive or captivatingly melancholic.
While the early works are dominated by stylized descriptiveness inserted into the figures and frames without a direct link to the photograph (Situation, 2010), in the later black and white paintings the figure, admittedly linked to the photographic model, is removed from its environment and subjected to a painterly reinterpretation (e.g. sports motifs). . The early works are expressively unified. Their existential mood is controlled by a relaxed grotesque imagination and a sense of the absurd. Even the choice of green tones contains a certain ironic irony, which purposefully places the figuratively developed narrative in artificial lighting. They are a kind of parallel, dreamlike worlds in which, for the degree of their stylization (including the color direction), it is possible to combine real object sources with subliminal deformations. The evocation of the dream principle or hallucination is consistently elaborated here into illusory plausibility and sensory mystification.
In his last paintings and especially his drawings, Hubálek frees up his means of expression in favor of drawing automatism and lets his own subconscious speak. He is aware of his importance as an eyewitness of events, without whom the past is always lame and incomplete. And also a little black and white. The exhibition is accompanied by a graphic publication by Studio Dipozitiv, which contains a retrospective selection of works by Jakub Hubálek together with an accompanying text by the curator Petr Vaňous and an interview by Tomáš Poláček with the artist.
