Jiří Petrbok, Kamil Princ
MOZKOMOR NIKDY NESPÍ (The Dementor Never Sleeps)
HIDDEN Bořivojova
12. 02. / 12. 4. 2025
opening: 11. 02. 2025, 18:00
After three years of focusing exclusively on international artists, we’re turning our attention back to the Czech art scene—bringing you unexpected encounters with some of its most striking voices.
The exhibition Mozkomor Never Sleeps connects two creative spheres and philosophical approaches: the painter Jiří Petrbok and the poet Kamil Princ, that is, image (imago) and word (logos). However, this is not a harmonious and peace-bringing connection – rather, we are witnessing the collision of two trains, from the burning wreckage of which something unexpected and shocking will emerge.
Petrbok’s work is based on metaphorical depictions of abstract relationships, qualities, and concepts, which he symbolically manipulates much like algebra works with mathematical elements. Instead of numbers, matrices, and polynomials, he uses colors, forms, and shapes, which he places into new equations and contexts, thereby gaining additional meanings. Unlike many surrealist painters who work with dreams and the subconscious, Petrbok’s visual language is grounded in impeccable logic, which communicates with us through complex codes.
Princ, on the other hand, destructively dissects his own poetry, surgically separating individual verses and phrases, and then lays these linguistic segments on the operating table of Petrbok’s prints. By uprooting them from their original context and synthesizing them with the visual work, concepts are created that, although abnormal, are also spiritual, for the torso of the ritualistically sacrificed poem reaches its resurrection as a magical incantation, gaining new life, albeit as a Frankenstein’s monster. This reverse Kafkaesque metamorphosis, from the miasmatically impure to the primordial untainted reality of “actus purus,” is never completed and remains only a brief flash against the backdrop of eternity.
Petrbok, therefore, captures Husserl’s natural world (Lebenswelt) in its naked essence, before it is distorted by our rationalizing mind, while Princ perceives the world through Derrida’s deconstructive linguistics, where words serve as semantic anchors for understanding reality. In other words, the exhibition brings together the principles of seeing the world as a fleeting visual being just before it is distorted by our thought judgments, and the perception of the world through the concepts of language as a communicative code that objectifies our individual reality. The poem becomes an element of the image, and the image an element of the poem, with the boundary between the two collapsing like the walls of biblical Jericho.
Where Princ, with his concept of the word as the “exoskeleton of consciousness,” polemically engages with Plato’s dialogue Cratylus, Petrbok combines three of Patocka’s movements of human existence with Schopenhauer’s will to live (Wille zum Leben). The movement of grounding refers to being thrown into life (Geworfenheit) with an emphasis on accepting the biological body and with it our dark instincts and base needs. The movement of struggle forces us to assert ourselves aggressively and sexually at the expense of others, after which the movement of breakthrough questions the authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) of our way of being and acting, urging us to resist the dictatorship of our inherent tendencies to reproduce recklessly and destroy each other. Pathological sediments in the depths of our soul become the proverbial “Mozkomor,” which never sleeps and instead waits for us to fall into vulnerable lethargy.
There are phenomena that defy the usual categories of human reason, and this exhibition aims to step out of the vicious circle of general normality and explore new forms of combinatorics between visual and written expression. It is only through intellect and creativity (that is, art) that we can not only discover and tame the proverbial Mozkomor of our blind passions but perhaps even domesticate it and reconcile with it.