Light My Way

Jakub Tytykalo is a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (Jiří Lindovský’s Printmaking Studio). During his studies, he completed internships at Jiří Petrbok's Drawing Studio, Jaroslav Róna's Sculpture Studio, and attended the Painting Studio at the University of Madrid as part of the Erasmus program. In his paintings, he blurs the boundary between abstraction and representation. A certain sacralization and the specific color palette of the objects on his canvases evoke surrealist archetypes found in Italian and Spanish Mannerist painting. Inspiration from Classical Modernism can be clearly traced throughout Tytykalo's work. Fragmented figures, still lifes, landscapes, and more recently, urban scenes evoke Cubism through their compositional structure and reduced color palette. However, unlike Cubism's emphasis on the act of seeing and the problem of representation, Tytykalo turns to imagination: he models the form in his paintings primarily with an emphasis on its imaginative potential. Jakub's combination of acrylic painting and spray paint inventively merges classical figurative painting with the lightness and playfulness of street art.