Jan Vytiska
The paintings by Jan Vytiska that make up the exhibition Revelation are a closed cycle of works created over the last two years. Individual works were inspired by the last book of the New Testament, The Revelation of Saint John (the Book of the Apocalypse). This text is attributed to John of Patmos and is a key biblical document. It contains a number of powerful and expressive motifs that have been an important source of inspiration for artists since as far back as the Middle Ages. Examples abound, ranging from the late mediaeval (Dirk Bouts), the Renaissance (Pieter Brueghel the Elder), and the Baroque (Peter Paul Rubens), all the way to 19th-century art (John Martin). In this context, William Blake’s series of visionary watercolours, created between 1805 and 1810, occupy a special place. Since then, this theme has appeared less and less in the visual arts, and Jan Vytiska’s series of paintings now represents an exception and a distinctive contribution to this tradition.
For connoisseurs of Vytiska’s work, Revelation as a theme is not surprising, since the artist has long had an interest in tense and heightened motifs. Again, direct references to the Apocalypse are hidden in the details, in non-violent allusions that most viewers will miss. The basic form remains the same, with the larger formats mostly oriented horizontally. Vytiska continues his “oil” period, with oil on canvas already prevalent in the recent exhibition The Ritual of Cursed Hearts (2023) at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art. The current paintings feel even more confident and vibrant, and Vytiska is still exploring the new possibilities that this technique offers. What stands out in particular is the plethora of important details already mentioned. Also in this series we witness rituals that take place against the artist’s typical backdrops of log cabins or mountain massifs. These references to folklore, as well as the oozing eye and a whiff of naturalist horror, are typical of the artist. Girls feature almost exclusively in the paintings, fearless, somewhat melancholic heroines standing up to evil itself. They are often dressed in clothes that do not fit into the folkloric theme and look somewhat out of place. This culminates in a monumental diptych in which Vytiska synthesizes the motifs and themes into two large formats in which heaven and hell, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, difference and sameness, and life and death are combined.
