Jan Matýsek↓

About the work

Ugh!!

Jan Matýsek is a visual artist and set designer who employs external and internal perceptions to create his own stories and myths and, through their associations and causality, explains the phenomena between heaven and earth. He combines the subjects of transhumanism, ecofeminism and corporeality on the one hand and, on the other hand, the psychotherapeutic methods of hypnosis. Most of his videos lay emphasis on the imagination of the unconscious. He incorporates them in video installations – imaginary, ritual spaces, and via direct communication with the audience mediates their transformation or transcendence on the inner level. He draws inspiration from shamanic practices of initiation and awareness of the hidden. Matýsek graduated from the field of stage design at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno and completed an internship at the Berlin UdK in the Experimental Film studio.

Matýsek’s work Fuj tajxl!! (Ugh!!) is the way to the underworld. You descend into darkness and recollect what you have displaced long ago. You encounter the hairy-horned in the form of a shadow, a male archetype. Do you have déjà vu? The devil is a powerful weapon of patriarchy and, simultaneously, what it fears the most. He is the medium of knowledge, the addition to the full moon. He burns (Psychopompos)!! His horns hypnotize. He boasts a balance of the two principles of dualism, but also an insurmountable gap between them. You have a hard-on. The silent tension covers the deafening image of naturalness like foam. You move away by a hair’s breadth with each shave.

A little boy, intoxicated by infantilism, frets in your tail bone. It tickles. You dig out a beast and kiss it, giggling. It would like to penetrate you from behind. You taste the paradox. You freak, you transcend. The beat from below announces an initiation ritual. You synchronize your mental speed-rhythm with the invisible. You become the boy in order to sacrifice yourself. You shrink; you perceive the world as if you stood half-tall. You are suffocated at heights of an adult body, far from the ground. Far from children’s consciousness when it was still milky. Don’t sleep – you’ll be a man tonight! Dance!!