Jan Soumar↓

About the work

Be in Reality

My diploma work is a follow-up to my previous series of paintings I worked on in my third and fourth year of study and I connect it to the series I have been working on for the last two years. The previous series of paintings focused on visual garbage or smog that surrounds us every day and becomes part of the environment we live in. It penetrates into our subconscious. From these visual banners and Barnumian posters and advertisements I subjectively selected the most interesting elements, which I later combined in a collage-like manner to form sketches for my paintings, genre-classified as figures in the landscape. Each sketch included a figure that was surrounded by other elements of cuttings until it almost disappeared in them.

From this form, I gradually moved on to taking my own images, which I continued to work with in a collage-like manner, but also to taking bad images, which were often taken through various mobile apps that clearly tell us, for example, the trajectory of the image, the speed, etc… When taking these pictures, various deformations were caused by non-compatibilities with the software application, various deflections and failings to respond to commands. These deformations became so appealing and interesting to me that I began to focus primarily on them.

At the time I started working with this formal element, I was watching the Black Mirror series and realized that there was a certain connection that I would like to continue working with in my work. The series was just the impetus to start working on the subject, the main point and building block for this series was the distorted images and my perception of the footage being forever distorted and, in a way, spoiled. These are moments that are irreplaceable at this very time, recorded only on a limited display that – even if we had not used the aforementioned apps – would have distorted them. I am referring to the phenomenon of taking a snapshot and not paying attention to things in real time, when the recording becomes the main element of the perception of reality, there is no time to pay attention to certain moments in real time, to perceive them and be in direct confrontation with them, it is a kind of absent-mindedness and hastiness of the current era.

In the paintings we can also see limiting elements, representing the boundaries of the display, the interconnection of different environments, showing the distortion of attention and (not) being in multiple places at the same moment, due to the focus on the mobile phone screen at the moment when we are actually in a place that we are not able to fully perceive.