Lukáš Malina: Snowman's Skeleton

Why is hide-and-seek such a dangerous game? What is it like to make love to a werewolf, and why aren’t women afraid of him? Why iron a man? Your face flows over, you turn red, and you lose face. 

Looking at life as a timeline – childhood, youth, middle age and old age – is one of the worst prejudices through which we have ruined our lives. Today, the only people who can still avoid being accused of childishness and immaturity are artists, athletes, and the homeless. And don’t forget all the childish and immature wretches we have locked up in institutions. Why are childhood heroes and stories so dangerous during adulthood? Why do we force our horrible grown-up stories onto our children? After all, we want them to constantly be sweet and childlike – the way we as adults see childhood long after its true essence has been successfully erased from our minds. And all of a sudden, in the cries, eyes and faces of our children, we see a moment of absurd longing, cruel passion, and amoral heroism... and we punish them.

When asked about the subject of his art, Lukáš Malina often answers by referring to the imagination and dreams of childhood. I dreamt it, and it happened like this and that is how it is in the painting. The paintings are like scenes from the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by that dreamer, Edgar Allen Poe. They are like giantesses escaped from the tales of another dreamer, Mircea Eliade, like strange rituals playing out in unwritten stories by the dreamers Yeats and Machen. But Malina has dreamt Raymond Chandler’s world of detectives and Usama ibn Munqidh’s world of battles, although his worlds are a bit stranger than theirs, unusual as they are on their own.

Ivan Mečl

Book Sounds Familiar by Zinovy Zinik and illustrated by Lukas Malina will be available at the show.