While the heart of his work lies in painting, he also focuses on drawing, object making and curating

During his time at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Prague, Matyáš Maláč (*1997, Svitavy, Czech Republic) was strongly influenced by his studies of classical painting techniques as well as his experience with graffiti. Subsequently, he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague under Vladimír Skrepl. He completed traineeships with Justin Fitzpatrick at the Visiting Artist Studio at the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague (UMPRUM) and at Listaháskóli Íslands in Reykjavík. While the heart of his work lies in painting, he also focuses on drawing, object making, and curating, whose possibilities he explores within the experimental curatorial platform Proto Gallery Systems (PGS). Maláč has been featured in solo exhibitions such as Love Your Data: The Life of Paranormie (Karpuchina Gallery, 2021), Viewpoint Vomiters (with Olbram Pavlíček, City Surfer, 2022), and Synthetic Spells (with Aleš Zapletal, POP-UP Gallery AVU, 2023–2024). He has been part of group exhibitions both in the Czech Republic and abroad: in Prague, among others, at MeetFactory, Karlin Studios, the Holešovická šachta Gallery, and the Berlinskej model Gallery, and also at the House of Arts Brno, the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts in Dresden, the Clubclub Gallery in Vienna, and No Moon in New York.

“Could all observable structure, then, be some astronomically distributed and rarefied neurosystem?” asks Thomas Moynihan in Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History. In it, he presents the reader with a speculative genealogy of the interplay between the human spine, humanity’s mental evolution, and the seemingly inert “exterior” including uncanny topological and geometric parallels between the cranial vault and the so-called great cosmic void (Boötes void). Our individual existence is thereby opened up to a profound temporality that goes far beyond the entire human species and forces us to see our own body and mind as repositories of sediments of cosmic events—a fractal map in which the history

of cosmogonic processes can be read on a reduced scale.

This introduction hopefully does not commit the secondary violence that sometimes characterizes efforts to theoretically frame the unique nature of an artwork. In Matyáš’s words, the book has, in fact, influenced him in many ways. A similar fractal approach to the relation between parts and wholes, microcosm and macrocosm, the archetypal and the topical, is found in his work not only on an intuitive level, but also on the strength of being informed by contemporary philosophical thinking. In the spirit of posthumanist and new materialist theories, as well as the findings of quantum physics, his canvases represent performative intersections of internal processes and seemingly “external” forces, between which he establishes an inevitable connection: internal organs, body parts, and all sorts of

excretions permeate the tangle of natural and technological systems and sprout before our eyes like shoots of a single, writhing mass.

However, this oppressive, processual materiality also conceals something elusive, almost spiritual: luminescent clusters, vague apparitions, and chimerical beings form across images from different periods. In Matyáš’s work, the sensitivity to those layers of reality which—due to the inadequacy of the rationalist vocabulary—tend to be labeled as “surreal” by the Western tradition of thought is naturally intertwined with a flair for capturing the absurd aspects of life in late neoliberal capitalism. The ability to link these seemingly disparate modes with remarkable ease was clearly demonstrated in Matyáš’s solo exhibition Love Your Data: The Life of Paranormie (2021).

The almost monochromatic, ghostly cold surfaces from this period were subsequently developed into a colorfully expressive and formally dynamic style in his thesis series Who Is Who. The mysterious subtlety has not disappeared from his work, nevertheless he has begun to look even more radically at the possibilities of expressing the viscous cacophony of post-digital experience. This intensity of colors and styles, drawing from various periods of art history as well as the now dominant computer-generated visuality, was first presented more comprehensively in the exhibition Viewpoint Vomiters (with Olbram Pavlíček, 2022). The fragments of pop culture motifs on these canvases do not strive for a stale critique of postmodern emptiness. In Matyáš’s work, they do not play the role of symbols pointing to consumer society; they are not representations, but they form the ingested, digested, and subsequently discarded tissue of the shared affective “biohypermediality ” of corporate neurocapitalism, as understood by Giorgio Grizzioti—the artist read by the memetic figure of Doomer-Houellebecq in the painting One Historical Epoch (Contemplation) (2022–2023).

Grizzioti defines the very notion of biohypermediality precisely by combining Foucaultian biopolitics with hypermediation. In line with this fusion, Matyáš’s work confronts us with a situation in which surveillance structures, through ubiquitous technological mediation, have been absorbed deep into our minds and bodies. More than ever, we cannot afford to distinguish between human and nature, the natural and the artificial, spirit and body, the spiritual and the material. Spiderman’s costume in the painting Unpleasant is woven from the same organic-technical fiber that passes through genetically modified bananas and is soaked up into the smooth walls of our intestines. The old forms of power, as Gilles Deleuze noted in his later works, are transformed in this mediatic regime into a “self-deforming cast” that is no longer determined by the walls of institutions, but is constantly changing and in flux—becoming intimate, ubiquitous, and customized.

The power space-time continuum of today therefore requires flexibility: a certain unanchoredness of the pirate, whose motif permeates the paintings in Maláč’s latest exhibition Synthetic Spells (with Aleš Zapletal, 2023–2024) and whom the artist describes as one who deliberately “exploits the opacity of the arrangement”. The confusion of perspective and spatial modulations present in many of his earlier works have blossomed here through a dense but relaxed movement into a multi-layered form that crisscrosses—with piratical audacity—seemingly disparate scales, contexts, and spheres. Here, the painter’s work becomes a materialization of the forced and necessary modulation of body and soul under the pressure of new forms of biopolitics.

Like the Viewpoint Vomiters exhibition, these canvases grow out of the experience of generative algorithms. They are not, however, thematic or formal ornaments, but the gradual embodiment of new modes of visuality through which we grow into technological infrastructures in an analogous way to how we have always been an integral part of natural ecosystems. This embodiment is inscribed in every brushstroke—even the digitally printed writing composed of buildings at the top of Caligula (2023) was created by the artist himself during COVID over the course of hours in the online game Cities Skylines. Underneath this post-digitally experienced “sky” stands out a rear-facing figure with a tattoo of Jack Sparrow on his back: the clearest articulation yet of the pirate motif, which in other paintings is hinted at by a pirate flag or a sailing ship instead.

In his hidden face, we can picture many of our own forms of piracy, through which we can move against the current of an opaque present. For Matyáš, this movement is painting itself, which in his approach becomes a transformative process close to a magical act. However, everyone can find their own oar for sailing in rough seas. For we are all, in a sense, the Flying Dutchman on a fractal journey between inner and outer space.

2023
Synthetic Spells, in dialogue with Aleš Zapletal, show curated by Helena Hájková, Galerie AVU, Prague (CZ)
Portal, show curated by Daniel Hüttler and Noemi Purkrábková, Club Club, Wien (AT)
Clueless Agency: The Stair Case -Nah …Nobody Home (Ding-Dong Lullaby), show curated by PGS, Laichter House, Prague (CZ)
Kingdom of Hex, group show curated by Jan Gajdušek, Meetfactory gallery, Prague (CZ)

2019
ME 2 ASHES,(Together with Marek Delong and Anna Slama, Mylasher, Anica Care) C.Rockefeller Center for Contemporary Arts, Dresden (DE)
Videokemp, group show curated by Viktor Čech, St. Agnes Monastery, National Gallery Prague (CZ)
Mice in Mine Made My Mind Like a Maze-Like Mine, curated by PGS, National Technical Museum Prague (CZ)
Make a Wish Lil Fish, (together with Julius Reichel and Namor Ynrobyv) curated by Caterina Antonaci, Label 201, Rome (IT)
VDIFF,group show curated by Milan Mikuláštík, Brno house of arts, Brno (CZ)