For the spring months of 2026, the Záhorie Gallery, in close collaboration with Prof. Ľudovít Hološka, has prepared an exhibition of Jakub Milčák, a painter and graphic artist who completed a large part of his studies abroad. The poetic title of the exhibition corresponds to the character of his work, a cross-section of which is presented in the gallery.

“The Relaxed Gravity of the Present”

Jakub’s large-scale compositions present universes of organic, vegetal, and biological shapes and forms. They are expressed in a varied gestural idiom within a dramatic color scale, often softened by chiaroscuro tonal techniques. They evoke baroque, turbulent events of form and color found on the vaults of churches and the ceilings of palaces.

He continues to develop the theme through the use of different techniques (e.g., oil) and by articulating forms on a monochrome yet color-active field. In this way, the image gains a diversity of shapes that distinguish and expand the effects of its striking color palette. Pure, enclosed abstract forms with distinct, saturated colors multiply the semantic richness of individual compositions. The dynamic abundance of colors and forms carries a wide range of connotative meanings.

“…the content of every painting is interiority, an invisible life in itself, which cannot cease to be and which permanently endures in its own darkness.”¹

The structures of the cosmos transition into structures of vegetation—leaves in the crowns of trees, deciduous and coniferous alike, grasses, flowers, weeds, herbs, reeds, terrains. Within this newly formed world of motifs, a human figure suddenly appears. As a hidden part of the natural world, it becomes a fairy-tale, mythical being, sometimes hybridized with the animal world of birds or insects.

This becomes most clearly defined in the painting Trilogy. The work is inspired by the prose of the same name by Jon Fosse—“a ballad-like story of the musician Asle and his companion Alida, two young lovers, a story of great themes: of love that demands fatal sacrifices, of fate that is both grace and curse and from which there is no escape, of death that takes our loved ones with definitive relentlessness…”²

In the painting, against the background of a dark sea and a gloomy sky through which starlight pierces the clouds, a pair walks forward. The linear construction of the composition contains a hidden tension. It diagonally bursts from the lower right edge of the format toward the upper left corner. Around these diagonal lines, contour lines of the figures—their faces, clothing, and the objects they carry—coil and stretch. The internal dynamism of the arabesques recalls the swirling compositions of the abstract paintings with which the artist began.

(excerpt from a text by Ľ. Hološka)

[1] Michel, Henry: Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Minor, 2023.
[2] Milčák, Peter – Ormandík, Marek: How to Read an Image. Modrý Peter, 2017.