Jan Poupě has established a stable position in the field of Czech visual art, mainly because of the geometrized form of his traditional oil paintings. However, the artist is able to comprehensively transcend this framework, thanks to his intense need for artistic experimentation, which is at the root of all of his projects. He very often transforms his precise understanding of the themes he has explored into a constructive sculptural discipline, a scientific experiment, or completely new forms of artistic experiments. Jan Poupě’s work is dominated by two particular themes that he has long devoted himself to and subjected to conceptual analysis: the physical phenomenon of flow and the phenomenon of landscape representation. The exhibition Neuralscape, prepared for the Telegraph Gallery, focuses mainly on the latter theme, i.e. how to understand the landscape, its retrospective interpretation, and its perception.

Jan Poupě’s way of representing landscape is neither mimetic nor purely abstract: it is more of a mental deconstruction of the perception of space that is subsequently transferred to the canvas. The artist imaginatively bends the tools of understanding space, such as perspective or scale, decomposing them into primitive elements in order to subsequently build a new landscape. In the neural network of the human brain, there are an infinite number of connections and variables to create new interactions. Jan Poupě refers to this mental infinity in his work, presenting it through the disciplines of painting, experimentation, and site-specific art.

Curated by Jan Dotřel

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