Tomáš Tichý

In his artistic practice, Tomáš Tichý mostly presents himself as a figurative painter, reflecting on the position of man and the nature of humanity in the conditions of the current world, as its boundaries with the virtual environment become increasingly blurred. Lately, however, classical figuration has practically disappeared from Tichý’s paintings, as if in an era of easily manipulated reality, overflowing with images of idealised faces, we were losing the notion of what it actually means to be human today. And although humankind remains the basis for the author’s thinking, in his current work, flat, abstract structures seem to have taken over, sometimes revealing only a vague fragment of the human body, like a flash of a distant memory. The paintings are dominated by strange objects, “digital plants”, which the author sees as a visual metaphor for artificial intelligence. The forms of the objects, evoking both the biological process of organic growth and the process of data replication in a virtual environment, have gradually transformed into something like universal painting models, bearing meaning on many different levels – from the principles of human thought and perception, through data flows in the digital sphere, all the way to the cosmological or astrophysical levels. 

Tichý’s paintings also evoke a feeling of vast space, in which the passage of time takes place in dimensions completely different from those we are familiar with. However, Tichý ultimately manages to connect this vision of faraway cosmic spheres and parallel spaces through the illusory motif of the butterfly, creating a single continuous universe in which we do not have the answers to some questions, and the imaginative power of mystery remains tantalizingly provocative.