Tomáš Němec

- Room with a mattress

11.06. - 24.08. 2014

Tomáš Němec, a young painter, whose whole future still lies ahead, already leaves behind a work of great power and of irreplaceable expression. His paintings are created in an orderly euphoria and overpowering need to creatively rip through both the unease and happiness. The desire for a paradise, search and fulfilment in the world of beauty and the decision to uncompromisingly try to reach his romantic ideals affect his whole painting career. Němec’s main assets are his sense of colour, shape, gesticulative handwriting and his faithfulness to his motives. We remember his paintings for their timeless sensuality, fragility and signs of ecstatic perceptions or nostalgic moods. Tomáš freely moves through different painting genres and techniques and the interaction between them astonishes us. 

At the current exhibition we are confronted with a selection of recent Tomáš’s paintings. It is a monothematic set of smaller formats including a few larger sized canvases, which are all tied together with a fitting name. The title Room with a mattress resembles the life of the author himself. It is a life that is unrestrained, passionate but also modest and ascetic. Most of his time the author spends in his studio overwhelmed by his work. A mattress – a temporary bed or a room figure as a place for a naked model to lie about in in all of these paintings. It is the same type of appealing boyish beauty over and over again. Even though the characters quite exceptionally look into our eyes and their identity does not depend on other signs and symbols, these are concrete portraits of a few real people with their own life stories. 

Young men are observed from a close distance and in very intimate positions. In spite of mostly being naked, they do not give the impression of being just models . There is something casual but menacing about their sensual, seemingly unaware posing. The characters are sitting, lying, resting or reading naked and unprotected. They look as if they were victims of an unknown obsession, like objects of a vain collector. Němec captures the models with his typical method – quick sketchlike strokes indicating the volatility and transience of a moment. The trembling of his painting language points out both the troubled, whimsical and volatile atmosphere and the exaggerated tragic feel to his observance of passing beauty. In Room with a mattress we only find this one and repeating motive, which is seemingly simple, mechanical and for someone excessively sweet. However the set of paintings contains a mystery that induces different associations and shades of complicated emotions.