Author and visual artist Nick Havelka and curator Kristýna Černá manifest their abroad conversations about more or less tragic situations that happened to the author during the last year. The figurative paintings introduce the viewer to the scenes of past events like frozen sequences from a play of his own life, where the relationships between the characters evolve over time and can surprise even the author himself. The central themes of the exhibition, which are loss, graduation, separation and isolation, must be uncovered by the viewer in the layers of the artist's precise reverse archaeology. The construction of the mass is quite fundamental in Nick Havelka's work, as proof that his characters have a past. The absence of blank areas on the canvas is substituted by the white walls of the gallery, without which the viewer's eye would find it difficult to orient itself. This can best be illustrated in the exhibition's main dominant, the painting Ritual 230 x 190, in which the multitude of layered subjects has already reframed the overall character of the scene many times. The fact that we observe a mask on a two-dimensional canvas does not mean that there is no face hiding underneath. The exhibition offers many of these to see. They can be understood simply as technical portrait exercises for large-scale paintings, but also as a possible graphic imprint of one's own character, or as an opportunity to make eye contact with one's own self.

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