Jan Valík paints thresholds: between land and memory, figuration and abstraction, light and its shadow double. Working primarily in oil and watercolour, his surfaces are built slowly and intuitively, until something coherent emerges in sensation. The result is atmospheric, layered, and alive with ambiguity.
Valík’s paintings do not offer traditional resolution. They offer something deeper: integration. A kind of suspended coherence that is not fixed or closed but held. There is often a centre of gravity in the work, a sun, a rupture, a mass. Marks drift, hover, dissolve. And yet the paintings do not feel chaotic or fractured. They feel composed. Contained. Something has been metabolised.
Titles such as In Between Land and Memory and A Sudden Shine echo the logic of dreams, where place becomes symbol and light might mean both contact and collapse. Throughout, there is a refusal to narrate. The work does not explain itself. Instead, it transmits mood, tempo, mythic residue.
A Czech-born artist based in London, Valík completed an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. His work is held in the Andrea and Manuela Bille Collection and has been exhibited internationally, with upcoming solo shows including Beijing’s Megafield Gallery. Yet the paintings remain unmoored from geography. They emerge instead from a kind of internal field shaped by psychic impression rather than cultural declaration.
To engage with a Valík painting is to enter a liminal zone. An ecosystem of gesture, absence, and symbolic charge - dreams with edges.
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