Hans Alf Gallery kicks off 2019 with a fresh and exciting new show that insists on inhabiting the vacuum between methodical awareness and unanchored immediacy.
David Minařík graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2017. In December of that same year, he had a small presentation in the Hans Alf Gallery project room that ran parallel to Christian Lemmerz' "The Night is Large", but "Now / No Nostalgia" will be his first proper solo in the city, where he was trained.
In an age of seeming historic myopia exemplified in what has been dubbed zombie formalism (a phrase coined by artist and critic Walter Robinson), David Minařík has 20-20 vision. Instead of blindly following suit and treating his paintings, as if they were merely vessels of aesthetic whims or conceptual statements, Minařík's work harks back to a different time; an unfashionable philosophy of sensations, emotions and unmediated impressions as the primary propulsion for painterly abstraction. His icons aren't Basquiat, Stella, Schnabel or Gerhard Richter, but rather Joan Mitchell, de Kooning (both), Kandinsky and Jorn.
David Minařík is something as rare these days as a card-carrying abstract expressionist, who actually understands, what that moniker entails. His paintings - wildly gestural, rich with colour and often deeply pastose - are the results of an intuitive process, where the painter, like his heroes before him, attempts to translate the moment - visual impressions, smells, taste, touch, emotions, interactions or melodies - into an unwavering, visual representation of a given now, which leaves the viewer with a distinct feeling of immediacy.
In "Now / No Nostalgia", David Minařík tries to encompass the effervescence of the moment, while simultaneously evoking the uncertainty of the next. In his own words, tomorrow, when planning ahead, seems to us "to hold specific shapes; a certain dynamic and structure; an undeniable rhythm and perspective" - when in fact, we have no idea, what is going to happen next. Man's ability to imagine the future even though it doesn't exist, is what Minařík utilizes when creating a painting. His abstractions on the nature of the now, are decipherable exactly because we as human beings are only capable of comprehending the future in abstract terms. And thus, in a somewhat self-referential fashion, the past summons the future to understand the present.
