Jan Valik approaches painting as an ecosystem of fragmented thoughts, intangible territories and semi-open zones. His painting process is a form of visualised doubts and decisions, both perceptual and psychological, that obey yet undermine the implicit rules and oscillate between a number of possibilities all at once. This in between-ness is a crucial element, allowing for simultaneity and permeability of chance and control and shifts from accidental marks to conjured spaces.
Reliant on immediacy, impulse and emotion Valik tries to paint at that elusive intersection where the external space affects the internal one. This leads him to explore the immersion into a sense of play, aware of painting’s escapist naiveties, even irony and absurdity in an ever increasing and omnipresent tensions of the world and one’s position in it.
Through these fluctuating tensions he explores the expansive concept of non-place and de-territorialised spaces, evocation of otherness and belonging underscored by contemporary issues of global displacement, issues of environmental nature and post-humanist understanding of histories.
It is somewhere between limits and possibilities of the gesture that can be seen both for its intrinsic properties and for its ability to imply fictive spaces, that the dialogue takes place.