Jakub Tomáš: Five String Serenade

Asya Geisberg Gallery is thrilled to announce Jakub Tomáš's exhibition "Five String Serenade," the Czech artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Tomáš initiates his painting process using small-scale paper models, made with reassembled fragments from magazines or the internet. These clunky provisional compositions are arranged and lit like stage sets, then elaborated into larger paintings. Bodies start and stop abruptly, in awkward poses, limbs jut at odd angles or end in inversely shrinking shoes, while brown eyes gape out of peach-skinned façades. The resulting works bear the fruit of Tomáš’s Czech influences: puppetry, stop-motion animation, and Carnival mask-wearing revelers.

The centrality of Tomáš’s process comes to the fore immediately, yet it remains unclear if the oddness is a bug or a feature. Do the cardboard maquettes initiate the uncanny, with a chin from one and a forehead from another? Do the doubling eyes, ears, and lips communicate symbolically or disrupt in a Backrooms-like pastiche? Or, does Tomáš dream up these juxtapositions and then translate them into three and then two dimensions? Cubist angled faces, stone-hewn Hellenistic heads, or the flattened masks of James Ensor sometimes coexist within the same painting. Tomáš further compounds the odd spatial relationships by adding borders, walls, camouflage patterns, or perspective shifts.

Familiar environments skew quickly into ambiguous narratives, as people interact with sculptural motors, or escape ubiquitous technology by frolicking in nature, playing guitar, or communing. In “Six Heads and Eight Cylinders,” an abstracted engine is the centerpiece amidst a sextet of heads from different eras and styles, like a Greek Chorus mutely observing or disapproving. “Girl with Engine” shows a Modigliani-esque teen with an inscrutable face, presenting an impossibly heavy engine. Has she dredged it up from the twilit pond behind her, a relic of industries past? In “Source (Backup Power)" a family gathers as a pinafored young girl faces the symbolic power source. In “Pussy Willow,” an intensely disproportioned girl, donned in an old-fashioned folk art jacket, holds a pink engine-womb-vase. White Airpods sprout, suggesting hybrid flowers—a Dada-esque joke.

Other paintings have couples or groups in intimate interludes or conjugal visits, where humans are trying to connect once the tech is removed. Without judgment and at times absurd, Tomáš’s paintings avert an easy read. His visual trickery and narrative feints are surmounted with a painterly exuberance. Despite being unmoored, we revel in the pleasures of Tomáš's ordinary scenes submerged in slippages of time and space.