Jáchym Šimek, Lukáš Šmejkal – Wandering by Pinning
September 18, 2024 — November 20, 2024
Kvalitář Gallery, Prague, Czechia
“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”1
The exhibition project "Wandering by Pinning" by Jáchym Šimek and Lukáš Šmejkal is based on the synthesis of metaphorical images that generally connect the reflection on space and temporality. In the artists' practice, both of these phenomena appear as a human construct, strongly shaped not only by experience, but also by the possibility of expressing and then transmitting this experience. Together with the artists, we thus find ourselves in visual labyrinths in which it is not certain whether we are dealing with the reconstruction of a single holistic perspective of reality or with the gradually unfolding delirium of individual episodes. The passing landscape, whether urban, natural or somewhere in between, includes both nostalgic images of sunsets or crescent moons marked by the iconography of road movies (Šmejkal's paintings) and images drawing on once-ancient metropolises and their narratives, now shaped by the all-encompassing influences of technology (Šimek's sculptural objects).
Moving through this broad and captivating space captured in the artworks, however, is not easy; time passes, overflows, sometimes freezes, only to blow back like a wild backwind, ruffling hair and memory. It is made up of everything experienced and seen, and although we can step into it and out of it at any time, its unanchoredness conditions it to always begin to disintegrate at the slightest effort to extract it. The absence of an "absolute" present and the relativity of any time consisting of "real" events2 again and again emphasizes the processuality of the works on display rather than capturing the essence of the concrete. The frequent blending of space and figure into a single sign in the practice of both artists does not make the situation any easier in the end - the audience is driven forward by the illusion of being satisfied with the unravelling of the plot, whereupon they discover that the causality itself is inherently missing some components, and the plot itself is thus created on the run each time. This openness can be understood as a weaving loom in which the world is seen as a fabric of many folds that can be woven and unwoven3, or as a theatrical stage in which each successive episode refers to other stories that are hidden from us.
One of these “pábitelé"4 is Šimek's figure sitting at an art deco table, whose touch, charged with the shock of revelation, vibrates the surroundings. This ripple gradually reveals a machine whose purpose we do not yet have enough knowledge to understand, perhaps it could be a presence or dream catcher, and other artefacts of a rasterised utopian landscape. The whirling distancing from the "centre of gravity" of Šmejkal's large-scale paintings in turn outlines the risks between meditativeness and madness from the ambiguity, aporias or paradoxicality of reality. The practice of Jáchym Šimek and Lukáš Šmejkal can thus resemble map-making, physical archiving by pinning mental pins, records of wandering, a game of transparency and hiddenness, of approaching and receding or getting lost to find, at the end of which, apart from the topography of hypnotic visions, we find only more questions. What remains is an invitation to new ways of seeing, an invitation to glimpse the complexities of everyday riddles, to try out the role of detective.
Jáchym Šimek (*2000) is a sculptor who is constantly testing the medium of sculpture. This manifests itself primarily in his deconstructive approach, through which he examines the limits between painting and sculpture in the territory of the three-dimensional object. His reliefs and busts can be perceived as records of more complex narratives, characterized by a symbolic contemplation of themes on the border between posthumanism and the natural (physical) sciences. His work can currently be seen at group show Zlínský salón mladých at the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín. Šimek has been a student of the Studio of Figurative Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague since 2020, where in the academic year 2023/2024 he underwent an internship in the painting studio of Josef Bolf and Jakub Hošek.
Lukáš Šmejkal (*1995) is a recent graduate of the studio Fine Art II at UMPRUM, once led by Jiří Černický and Michal Novotný, now by Lenka Vítková and Denisa Bytelová. During his studies he completed two internships - one with Sam Lewitt, the other with Matt Mulican. His painting practice has long been characterized by working with fragmented records of urban and natural landscapes, in the early years mainly nighttime, later seaside and daytime due to his postgraduate internship in Portugal. The reflection on form and content in his practice culminates in the pictorial interweaving of these landscapes with organically unfolding human figures, naturally exploring for himself the boundaries of abstraction and symbolism. Šmejkal's paintings were most recently part of the exhibition Pole typu mihotání at Prague Art Week in a former bank in the centre of Prague (Jerusalemémská 964/4).
1 Roberto Bolaňo, Divocí detektivové, Prague 2008, p. 113.
2 Ladislav Hejdánek, Svět a (jeho) přítomnost, Myšlenkový deník – záznam, https://www.hejdanek.eu/Archive/Detail/3266000000107, searched 4. 8. 2024.
3 Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, London 2018.
4 "Pábitel" is the term of Czech fiction writer Bohumil Hrabal and the title of his collection of short stories (1964). The meaning is used for a person who does not distinguish between fantasy and reality, looking for beauty in everyday life. Elements of poeticism and surrealism often appear in his actions.