Jakub Tomáš / Make up

    The latest installment in the West Point project series, which seeks to present artists formed by the context of Pilsen and the southwestern borderlands, is a solo exhibition of one of the most striking representatives of our middle generation of painters: Jakub Tomáš (1982), who – before moving on to the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague, where he studied with Vladimír Kokolia and Jiří Sopko – was in fact enrolled at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen between 2002 and 2008. Over time, Jakub Tomáš has gained recognition as an artist of international renown. This summer alone, he had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York and Los Angeles and participated in a collective exhibition in London. He is currently working on an original project that is to be put on display in Eindhoven in the Netherlands.
    Since 2012, the year he graduated, Jakub Tomáš has been slowly but surely honing his creative language and delineating the scope of his subjects; in so doing, he has focused fully on figural work. His compositions are usually based on antecedents in the form of collages or small tableaus made of paper and construed in the manner of theatrical staging – in fact, in recent years, these models have taken on a life of their own, as object art supplemented by painting. While the events captured on canvas tend towards realism, one can see at first glance how they deviate from photographic descriptivism in favor of a more schematic language. And thus, in lieu of imitations of reality, the artist breathes life into what might be called stylized figural examples, halfway to abstraction, which resemble, if you will, scenarios of the everyday. Jakub Tomáš’s affinity for symbolic expression and his skill in working with topical, lived emotion, as well as with the cultural heritage of the past (whether it be ancient rituals or modernist architecture) only intensify the multifaceted nature of those works, the many levels on which they can be read.
    This is the first time that Jakub Tomáš is showcasing his work in Pilsen in a solo exhibition. With this in mind, he has imbued his project with context to make clear not only the current state of his art, but (at least by way of individual suggestions) also the path that led toward it. Indeed, a thematic and formal element is the integrative element of all the paintings on display. The most recent canvasses of Jakub Tomáš follow upon an open series of portraits that he began in Los Angeles. In several cases, they represent visual (re-)mixes of his closest circle, while others create a whole new identity for people whose likeness Tomáš has composed from a diverse range of sources. The germination points of this work sometimes originate from the artist’s own archive of photographs, sometimes from magazines or the internet.
    As we could see, e.g. with his exhibition Na Kopci St., Near the Park Benches (2022) at the Vysočina Regional Gallery in Jihlava (OGV Jihlava), in which he gave an artistic account of his own coming-of-age in a socialist pre-fab estate, the artist frequently draws upon his personal experience and upon his surroundings. In this sense, his work may be perceived as autobiographical. This is also why his latest figures are embedded in the landscape of Vysočina – the Czech-Moravian Highlands, where the artist lives. Among the symbols that make an appearance on his recent canvasses, robots and robotic hands are particularly conspicuous. For now, they are best understood to serve as an important means for his visual exploration of the possible relationships between humans and machines. One of these paintings lends its name to the exhibition as a whole – Make up. On the most general level, this term has a variety of meanings: to conceive of something, to put things together, to prettify a face. Each of them in fact characterizes Jakub Tomáš’s artistic work from a different angle. However, the first meaning that will generally come to people’s mind is that of applying a cosmetic surface layer to faces. According to the artist, a certain kind of painterly skill is in fact involved in this, which is why he perceives make-up to be a contemporary allegory for the art form of painting.
Radek Wohlmuth