28/10/2018 Severine Grosjean
The visuality of the work of Jakub Matuska aka ‘Masker’ is based on figuration and street art. Jakub Matuska’s painting emanates a rich range of expressive elements. He brilliantly unites the bright colored and aggressive genres that come close to German expressionism. These works show a derisory and pathetic humanity. His characters invade the foreground and bring to the composition a clash feeling. Through his paintings Masker expresses a world without any modesty. He express an unstable world, dynamic and constantly evolving, in which the pictorial perspectives are always being developed. He suggests the drama by using the deformation and enlargement of certain elements – which reveals a familiarity between distinct times and spaces. The artist approaches the dichotomies of the eternal and ephemeral, alive and dead, and beauty and ugliness. Stories intertwine in extraordinary worlds in which the tragic and the comic are tender and cruel.
Figuratively distorted and committed scenes in the environment are created while mutually permeable spaces are formed. Particularly, there is a strange atmosphere emanating from Masker’s work that draws the viewer into the heart of the artist’s mind. The distinctive style and relaxed imagination is a unique combination which allows emotions to be filled with happiness and sadness at the same time.
Masker manages to shake his viewer by breaking the codes of appearances. It is within this universe of light and beauty that monsters appear, which are themselves extremely standardized. There is a proliferation of faces and bodies becoming the common subject of an experiment. Almost always the hybridizations of the man with his new environment are essentially made of signs, symbolic apparatus of representation, and virtual machines which constitute a vast lacis in rhizome where the individual is little more than a knot, many times derisory, a prey to the dereliction and melancholy of a world where he reigned supreme.
The young painter is interested in the extraordinary forms that take certain manifestations characterized by a return to the anthropomorphic statuary, although paying the price of some strange hybridizations which interrogate an identity.
The human figure is central under the aegis of objects and nature. Masker makes this return to the distorted man, putted back in an macrocosm of signs and multiple and active interactions. These paintings are brutal and establish a new and unique definition. Fantastic comic scenarios in contrast to apocalyptic scenes are connected urgently. The real and the unreal reinforce the feeling of chaos and confusion
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
