The The Grass Is Greener exhibition by Patrik Adamec at The Chemistry Gallery presents the artist, who has established himself in recent years as a prominent personality of the younger generation of Czech artists. Adamec, winner of the 2023 Critics' Award for Young Painting, here freely builds on the work that has made his painting style easily recognizable - whether through his specific use of color, relief, or motifs of landscape, house and figure. In 2024, he participated in a residency at the Telegraph, which resulted in the exhibition Still Stuck at the Telegraph Cinema. Here the audience could get a glimpse of his sculptural work. Adamec is one of the most interesting personalities of the contemporary Czech scene among other things, because his work manages to be accessible and "playful" at first glance, yet without resorting to mannerism.
As soon as you enter, you are literally greeted by Nobody is Perfect (Courbet), and it is clear that this is not a classic presentation of individual works, but a complex installation. The gallery space is filled with scenography that evokes a kind of dreamy, childlike world: soft relief landscapes with sun, clouds and horizon, a fence, a bench, a life-size cottage. As Michaela Žůrková, the author of the exhibition text, mentions, this exhibition simply asks what you see and what you feel. The whole thing feels safe, welcoming, almost idyllic. You find yourself in an environment that is easy to read, visually appealing and immediately accessible. You've entered a setting that is primarily designed to function as an experience: walk around, take pictures, share. However, it is not a nostalgic memory of childhood, but rather an abstracted form of it. The scale is constantly shifting.
As already mentioned, soft relief images reminiscent of landscape fragments play a crucial role. The motif is so stabilized (sun-cloud-horizon-moat) that at some point it begins to function as a marker. The landscape becomes a logo of its own style. The set design works very well here: the viewer remembers "the space" and "the atmosphere". In his work, Adamec himself addresses when a person can be found or lost in a landscape. According to him, the paintings have a strong surrealistic undertone that leads him to question who he is and where he is. He believes that we don't know where we are going and we struggle with the system we have created, to which we adapt the landscape and nature, trying to understand it. And so he has certainly succeeded in evoking this feeling in many visitors.
The exhibition guides us through small works from the Landscape series, and works such as Your Ego Is In My View and Utopia feature ready-made objects, which is typical of Adamec's early work, appearing non-invasively in the middle of a lonely cottage. He works excellently with a sense of intimacy and a kind of existential tension. The figure here does not act as a storyteller, but as a silent witness or observer standing in a landscape that is colorful and soft, but at the same time somehow empty and impersonal.
The Grass Is Greener seems like a natural extension of his previous work - not as a radical break, but as an expansion of the possibilities of how far his "soft landscape" can reach. The exhibition is calm, open and welcoming, yet there remains something unspoken that forces the viewer to stay a moment longer and look around again.
