Asya Geisberg Gallery is thrilled to announce Jakub Tomáš's exhibition "Five String Serenade," the Czech artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Tomáš initiates his painting process using small-scale paper models, made with reassembled fragments from magazines or the internet. These clunky provisional compositions are arranged and lit like stage sets, then elaborated into larger paintings. Bodies start and stop abruptly, in awkward poses, limbs jut at odd angles or end in inversely shrinking shoes, while brown eyes gape out of peach-skinned façades. The resulting works bear the fruit of Tomáš’s Czech influences: puppetry, stop-motion animation, and Carnival mask-wearing revelers.
The centrality of Tomáš’s process comes to the fore immediately, yet it remains unclear if the oddness is a bug or a feature. Do the cardboard maquettes initiate the uncanny, with a chin from one and a forehead from another? Do the doubling eyes, ears, and lips communicate symbolically or disrupt in a Backrooms-like pastiche? Or, does Tomáš dream up these juxtapositions and then translate them into three and then two dimensions?