The 2022 season opens with two exhibitions, both dedicated to young art makers.

JOSEF ZLAMAL (1983), a Czech artist from Prague, employs the idiom of painting to tackle the major issues in his Eastern European culture. It is by drawing on his roots in this terrain, where the strength of awareness and of knowledge, but also of suffering in the dramas that unfolded in the course of the twentieth century, has been laid down in layers and crystallised, that this artist reiterates the strength of his own learning expressed by the medium of sign.

His idiom is that of painting, if we can still assert as much, taut between sign and figure. And it is because of this strongly European matrix of his that his gesture also becomes preponderant in his expression of content, as though his existential – and at times mystical-philosophical – stylings were an “epic” reflection in our continent’s tradition of great painting.

Balanced on a knife-edge between sign and conveying the sensation of his emotional calibre, Josef Zlamal more or less consciously expresses the circular and reversible transition between figuring and abstraction, between the call of tradition and the desire to overcome the paradigm of history.

Text by Mario Casanova, 2022, translated by Pete Kercher.

Ph MACT/CACT – Josef Zlamal