Alchemist
13.12.2022 - 28.1.2023
Matyáš Chochola revives his Alchemist after two years. The exhibition he prepared for the London gallery Gossamer Fog at the beginning of the dark covid winter 2020. This year, too, we find ourselves on the threshold of a gloomy period, only for other terrifying reasons that we would not have expected in the 21st century. Thus, an art project about a powerful shaman-alchemist remains magically current. With this project, the author confirms his image as a skilled provocateur and mystifier, whose works carry ambivalent meanings.
Matyáš Chochola does not just create individual artifacts, but an entire scenographic environment into which he projects his heretical vision of the world, both real and parallel, in which primordial forces gain the upper hand over human reason and the air smells of druids and success. The Alchemist exhibition is not a recycled one from London, it features completely new artefacts, for example trash-like screen prints with neon lights or glass sculptures, created using the technique of casting from polystyrene molds (lost foam). The non-random randomness of the sculptures, the intentional raw processing in the viewer evokes a conflicting desire to touch their surface, evokes delicacy, which is another of the aforementioned ambiguities arising from Chochola's work. Especially the basement of The Chemistry Gallery emanates healing energies and alchemical mystery. Atmospheric installations full of author's cryptograms together with video footage tell legends about the origin of the magical potion and its meaning, about the birth of the druid and his wanderings. The highlight of a visit to the Alchemist exhibition is a stay in the ritual laboratory of the highest of the druids, where nothing is impossible and where the fate of the individual and humanity is decided in a parallel reality, in a special intermediate time space, mythical and archetypal.
Matyáš Chochola is a Czech artist and performer, laureate of the Václav Chad Prize (2012) and the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize 2016. The core of Chochola's multi-layered artistic work is a performance on the border between shamanic and ritual ceremonies, during which art artifacts are created. He then composes these into unorthodox site-specific installations, which often combine wildness, strength and animality with the trashy aesthetics of nineties discos or a spiritual ceremony. He has exhibited in Berlin, Milan and at the prestigious contemporary art biennial Manifesta in Zurich, among others.