Jan Soumar - Look at this!

Honza Soumar (*1995, Prague) is probably the one who most examines the status quo of the figure itself, which he decomposes into another plane of situational visuality through deformation and fragmentation, thus changing the very genetic code of the figural narrative that "tells" about the media transformation of the image in the epoch of digital culture. The key to Jan Soumar's paintings is the painting Back into the Reality (2021). Here, pictorial reality is a substance in itself for visual and semantic reassessment. The artist paints from memory fragments of figures and landscape passages, which he collages into a single format together with modernist innovations that replace the clarity of illusory space and transform it into an abstract, sensual or, to use contemporary language, experiential environment. Painting fragments "from memory" leads to the repetition of certain schemes and points to the "world of forms" latent in the artist's subconscious. These are subliminal moments of memory that, at the same time consciously and involuntarily, enter the painting as washed-up remnants of narratives whose context has been swept away. In some places, the realistic moments and the overall deformations of the figures involved in the stream of floating pure forms seem deliberately irritating (Untitled, 2021; Deformed figure, 2021; Shoe laces, 2021), while in others the entire composition is unmasked and transformed into a new, artifice-like reality with mere memory connotations of a subject world that has definitively disappeared (Limbs, 2021). Most strikingly, the paintings work most fully with the contrast between the two spheres of expression (Look at this!, 2021; X boy, 2021), where either the traditional painterly iconographic scheme is ironized (Group conversation, 2021) or the modernist current of concrete painting, which is now a thing of the past (Color field, 2021).