Soon it will be dark...
The title of Ondřej Roubík's new exhibition (1988), in which he returns to the art scene after several years with a comprehensive set of paintings, is similarly personal and associative as his work itself. At first glance, the neutral sentence actually hides at least two urgent messages. The first is information about the time pressure, which is already present and determining at this moment. The second heralds the inevitable arrival of darkness, which may or may not be night.
Darkness is an open symbol. Mesopotamian and Egyptian tradition already perceived it as something chaotic and formless, in other words, a state before creation that had no order or rules and hid potential danger. After all, the Bible also speaks of it differently. But regardless of the iconography, the ordinary night also has the ability to almost automatically arouse in a person a sense of vigilance, fear and threat, however there may be no real reason for this. And precisely the uncertainty and expectation of something indefinable form the basic emotional framework of Ondřej Roubík's new cycle of paintings.
As one of the few artists of his generation, Ondřej Roubík is a figuralist in the truest sense of the word, with everything that belongs to this specialization. Although he sometimes also uses photographs in his work, he usually still paints from the model. Therefore, the characters from his paintings always have a specific face and are not anonymous to him. Although at the same time they represent an expression of a certain type, and thus it is possible to perceive them naturally, a significant component of their depiction and thus the energy of the image is created by the psychology of the portrait, which has long interested Ondřej Roubík and is one of the differentiating factors that give his work a specific quality.
Along with the fact that the people on the canvases belong to the circle of his acquaintances or even extended family, the situations that appear on them are also based on the author's real experiences, attitudes, emotions, fears or reflections. From this point of view, it is possible to perceive his paintings as autobiographical, but due to the fact that what takes place in them often has a suprapersonal character with a link to collective consciousness and experience, his visual thinking has general validity at the same time. This subjective-objective position is also supported by the symbolic language that Ondřej Roubík uses in the new series.
From the text of Radek Wohlmuth
Ondřej Roubík

Contemporary Czech painter (*1988) born in Pilsen. Between 2007 and 2014, he studied at the Academy of Arts in Prague (prof. V. Kokolia, ak. mal. J. Petrbok). In 2011 to 2012, he studied at The Royaľs Drawing School in London, where he also presented his drawings at the R.D.S. Gallery at the end of the residency.