Jakub Uksa

Painter and graphic artist Jakub Uksa (*1981) belongs to a strong generation of Prague writers (OBIC) who entered the graffiti scene in the mid-1990s. His relationship to writing and tightly defined shape is also determined by his studies in applied graphics. Almost from the beginning he drew inspiration from manifestations of strong ancient and oriental cultures. He consistently created his work without sketching as an intuitive freestyle. He saw them as a graphic puzzle, with the head
works a few strokes ahead, and only with the last line does the purist composition conclude itself, without the need to add anything to it artistically. In addition to the overall shape, he also experimented with "nervousness", width and multiplication of the line. Sometimes he reached the border of the pictogram. He exhibited his first canvases in 2015. They were precise schemes wrapped up in each other with geometric morphology, which developed his realizations in public space. Other possibilities were brought by the transformation of colour, where metallic shades are not missing, and attempts to open up the surface structure to a third dimension. If the fragments of kilns were the mainstay of his early paintings, he now sees the blank canvas as an unexplored continent. For him, the hanging painting is a system that functions as a whole, but he continues to address each line. Creation then remains an unfolding mental journey and an interdependent process.
Jakub Uksa's compositions deceive with the body. While they may evoke a sense of engineered purposefulness, they also contain improvisation and mystery. Moreover, he currently encodes elements of personal mythology into them through specific colours and shapes. The same is the case with the exhibition Sequence Travel, which takes a distant look at his work over the past few years. Some of the paintings refer to travels in Lapland or Indonesia, others note the experience of cosmic events related to our planet, while others turn to more general existential reflections - questions of impermanence, the spiritual realm or contemplation of movement through time. The emphasis on the subjective dimension of painting has also brought about a change in its conception. The formal solution became a language, the line is no longer the main carrier of the story, but becomes a capillary, a sign of identity, while the meaning passes to the colouristic component that opens the theme. The mental move away from pure form, in other words graffiti, towards content painting has come to a conclusion.