First We Ran Out of Gas, Then We Crashed (2025)

Without further ado, the title of the new exhibition of Jakub Matuška aka Masker points out that things do not always go as planned. At first glance, this sentence might refer to a family trip that went awry, which, after all, would only illustrate Matuška’s role as a visual storyteller, who, inter alia, overtly draws upon his personal life. Nevertheless, the unspecified first person plural, which does not exclude him from the group of concerned participants, but opens up their number to infinity, imparts an overlap of meaning and, ultimately, a nationwide dimension to the sentence. In other words, it allows it to be seen as a metaphor.

An almost banal statement can thus become a surprisingly topical and, above all, quite an apt comment on the current situation. At the same time, it involves not only environmental and technological but, unfortunately, also current political realities. After all, this is perhaps the key principle of Jakub Matuška’s visual thinking: a confrontational hovering between the quotidian and archetypal, the subjective and general, the visible and intended, the ideal and distorted – both in the physical and mental sense. All this is not only reflected in topics but, intuitively, also in the formal aspect of his works, which represent an original artistic fusion between drawing and painting.

Within this fusion, Jakub Matuška has moved towards greater subtlety and transparency. Small spontaneous sketches, later elaborated into detail through digital interventions, continue to be the ideological foundations for his paintings. His emphasis on contour lines reflects his graffiti past. Therefore, it is logical that he approaches drawing thoughtfully, with special regard to the varied nature of inner and outer contour lines – sometimes fragmented, sometimes, for a change, calligraphically vivid. Subsequently, he incorporates drawing into spatial plans, spraying paints over stencils with an airbrush and finishing with brush touches. In this case, too, it is an antagonistically defined whole that takes the form of somewhat controlled chaos, with the nervous freedom of drawing on the one hand and the fixed boundaries of the pasteboard on the other.

Although this process is ultimately quite lengthy, the intention is to make everything look simple, relaxed, and perhaps even a little odd. Just like in life. After all, the seemingly insignificant moments of everyday life are often the enlightened points of departure and basic impetuses of Matuška’s works, which are further developed by associative chains. In most cases, he captures them almost literally. It is the nakedness of figures, glimpses into their bowels, or extremely unfavourable constellation of circumstances, be it a too steep hill, the minefields of dog excrements on the pavement, or tree stumps growing through the roadway, that Matuška uses to take his works out of the confines of the ordinary.

Although Jakub Matuška almost exclusively captures his own world, it actually reflects the collective experience of relational, emotional, and thought patterns that are virtually common to everyone. This way, his personal becomes public, and his attention is de facto focused on a human in a specific life situation rather than on himself. It is also one of the main reasons why his paintings are quite easy to interpret. Through himself, he offers an inquisitive look at a broader and often slightly futile image of society, which, however, is usually so deep-rooted in us that we can no longer see it.

It is not the only point that he naturally reflects on the life of a family with two small children, a spectrum that paradoxically is not widely covered by artists, even though it is probably the most common model. There is at least one more aspect: the realization that the life goal is often completely different from the means by which one desires and attempts to achieve it. First, we run out of gas. Then we crash. And then it is too late for everything.

Radek Wohlmuth