František Petrák & Tomáš Absolon: Mirror on the Easel

Painters František Petrák and Tomáš Absolon are exhibiting together for the first time, despite their family relationship as well as their personal and formal affinities. The joint exhibition intuitively addresses the process of translation, which is part of their intergenerational dialogue, but above all is a process of inevitably reductive reflection of lived reality onto the surface of a two-dimensional image.

In the 1990s, František Petrák became deeply engaged with graphic design, while also teaching the discipline for many years at the Secondary School of Arts and Crafts in Uherské Hradiště. Alongside his practice as a painter and educator, his work encompasses the design of theatre posters, scholarly publications, and museum exhibitions. His work with a didactic dimension for children can be regarded as a category in its own right. František has created numerous distinctive leporellos, illustrations, and is the director of his own authorial puppet-theatre project—the travelling Teatro Pimprle. These individual positions are not separate directions within his practice, but rather form a functional whole, whose components variously enrich the visual language of the rich painting cycles in which František usually works. Their characteristic motif is stylized animals with bodies resembling poetic signs, reduced to their primordial essence. Animals that tell the story of all their ancestors, all the way back to biblical times. It is therefore no coincidence that one of František’s most distinctive motifs is St. Francis with the Birds, which brings together the ability to translate the language of birds, an archetypal self-portrait, and František’s work on a series of Jurkovič-inspired birdhouses for the birds of Luhačovice. One of his most recent cycles is the Paradisus series, in which František populated the formats of his canvases, like salvaged Noah’s arks, with animals. For the exhibition at Studio PRÁM, however, we have selected a series of Painters that has been developing continuously over the past several years and has until now been obscured by throngs of animals. The repetitive depiction of a painter with a brush in hand and a canvas on an easel sometimes allows, through the ornamental precision of its geometricized forms and the device of the picture-within-a-picture, a blue sky and freedom of gesture to enter the studio; at other times, it becomes a miniature trompe-l’œil, collage-like in its appropriation of notoriously familiar motifs from art-history textbooks. The recurring figurative composition is complemented by Čapek-like strokes, which come together to form the figure of a boy gazing in wonder at a picture gallery, only to finally close in on itself through perfect mirroring in one of the more recent formats.

Tomáš Absolon belongs to a generation of painters who came of age at a time when internet and post-internet influences were reshaping artistic practice. Their explorations were characterized by post-structural approaches to image-making and by the motif of the gradient, whose perfection became a symbol of the struggle with the unattainable precision of the digital image. Tomáš is a collector of urban photographic moments whose visual character subtly connects his work to contemporary photography, which often deliberately draws on imperfectly captured images and technical flaws. The sharply green, violet, or blue fringes around photographed subjects, caused by the different refraction of light wavelengths through an inferior lens, backlit views, or distortions of space produced by depth of field are, for Tomáš, moments of imperfect translation—or, rather, moments in which a new kind of image comes into being. He treats buildings covered in scaffolding, traffic signs set against sunsets, as well as portraits and flocks of birds, as figures, persistently translating them into his own visual language, situated between forms freed from their original meanings and a personal “infographic” that, in turn, makes faces, signs, and scaffolding recognizable in new ways. In this exhibition, Tomáš takes the idea of the image as a reproduction of reality further, installing large-format photographs of the gallery space in the very places they depict. What do we lose from the experience of three-dimensional reality despite the sophisticated technical means available for translating an image onto a flat surface? Or does something new emerge instead? How is it possible that we recognize the reflection of our own face in three points within a circle?

The painterly dialogue between František Petrák and Tomáš Absolon is a moment extracted from their ongoing creative investigation of two-dimensionality, one that has been disrupted by accelerations brought about by fundamental technological shifts. Their generational experiences mirror one another, including their faith in the human being as an irreplaceable mirror of the world around us.

The project is implemented with financial support from City of Prague and State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic. This exhibition is part of the Parallel Program of Fotograf Zone festival 2026.