In 1904, Henri Matisse painted a mythical picture inspired by the landscape of Saint Tropez, the luminous pointillism of his friend Paul Signac, and some verses from Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal”: Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, / Luxe, calme et volupté. There, everything is order and beauty, / Luxury, calmness, and voluptuousness. That painting, created as if by a wild beast (fauve), broke with perspective tradition, with the representation of the body, and with the treatment of color in a wild manner, although the scene is very classical and tranquil. 

Perhaps it is a similar gesture, a close game, that is activated in the paintings of Miroslav Pelák (Slovakia, 1992) in this first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled “Glimmers of Reverie,” which brings together a series of everyday life scenes that constitute an ironic, even sometimes burlesque commentary on contemporary customs and practices in Central Europe, reflecting what it is like in our globalized world everywhere. This critical look at hedonism is manifested through scenes of bathers, pools, and terraces, the sporting cult of the body in gym sessions, exercise boards, acrobat training, running groups (men) and walking groups (women), or the portrait alongside cars as the symbolic projection of their owners. Everything is glimpses of dreams in our modern, voluptuous, and leisurely life. The scene is important, the moment when the characters (there are always characters) perform an action. What happens in the scene (which is no longer as classical or bucolic as in Matisse) is the key to pointing out that something mundane now reveals itself as banal: aspiring to the luxury of influencers, where did the calmness go? Meanwhile, everything seems to continue exuding voluptuousness through other pores. 

It is striking how Pelák’s compositions, and especially his characters, are framed and adjusted to the format of the painting, the way they fit together, wielding a powerful anatomy that becomes strange due to the multiplicity of viewpoints gathered in a single body, updating the cubist mode. We see it from different points while that same power becomes strong in foreshortenings straddling a certain Michelangelesque mannerism and, better, the memory of the impetus or imposition of the proletarian, athletic, heroic figure in the posters and murals of socialist realism. Moreover, it must be added, the representation of bodies stands out for the use of marked lines taken from expressionism (via Max Beckmann, for example), emphasizing that particular distorted anatomy and the tension of gestures performed by huge feet, long legs, and thick arms, and by tiny heads that hold the portrait of modern identity. 

The forced rupture of forms presented by Matisse’s painting over a century ago opened a path of avant-garde then, which could well lead us directly here, to this painting of postmodern effluvia, wild in its own way, which rescues the free style of the new expressionism along with a certain naivety of bad painting, while also presenting a social snapshot of the post-Internet moment that connects with the posturing of social networks and portrays, by painting it (and I emphasize: painting it), this new version of aspirations and desires for luxury, calmness, and voluptuousness in our time.