Penetration

Patrik Pelikán (1987) is in his fourth year of study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. Before entering the world of academic art, he gained experience in manual labor. He worked as a bricklayer, assistant laborer, and warehouse worker, which has had a significant impact on his creative approach. He studies under Jiří Petrbok in the Drawing studio and is currently an intern in the Graphics II studio, but his talent is strongly oriented towards painting. In his black-and-white drawings and meditative paintings, we recognize figurative motifs from the real world. Pelikán circles around them with touching empathy, but also with a certain intuitive suspicion, as if around the zero point of representation or the errant stone of anti-illusion.
In his current exhibition at Galerie 35M2, Patrik Pelikán more clearly declares his changed interest in the medium of painting, seeking a replacement for this revived yet collapsing medium, or rather its emotionally equivalent alternative, through critical dialogue. In doing so, he builds on last year's paintings, which are presented here and which do not attack the status of painting in any way. Two paintings from the free series Blinds thematically touch on the relationship between the figure in the form of a still life, the painterly field, and the viewer. In terms of the whole, it is still a classic hanging medium, even though one of the paintings on bookbinding canvas is not fixed on a solid frame. The motif of empty black windows is framed here with apparent compositional indifference, bringing to mind the structure of a vacuum and emphasizing the flat effect of observation.
The essence of the painter's changed perspective is hidden in the very title of the exhibition, which determined three other works on display – plastic sheeting stretched across an entire wall and coated with a trowel, a horizontal "unfolded" painting, and a vertical object called Penetration. The technology of penetration allows for permanent material change through the penetration of objects or various chemicals. However, given the materials used and the simple process by which these works were created, this is not a conscious attempt at real penetration. Pelikán rather points out that even the process itself or the craft logic in art represent the final form and, above all, expresses an important paradox related to what we are still willing to perceive as a valuable painterly intervention.

Michal Pěchouček