Jakub Ružinský

Faulty Dreams

15th August — 26th September 2024

MiNa Art Space, Košice, Slovakia

Solo exhibition

Photo by Ondrej Rychnavský

Curated by PhDr. Vladimír Beskid

Mina Gallery presents the young Slovak painter Jakub Ružinský (1996), a native of Košice who, after his studies, became part of the Ostrava art scene. This exhibition offers an insight into his recent works from 2022-2024, showcasing his magical world of dreams (hence Faulty Dreams) and enchanting paintings. Ružinský brings a unique approach to figurative painting, where archetypal symbolic language appears, and signs and symbols from medieval illuminations, Jungian active imagination, personal and collective unconscious, mythological, religious, and mystical stories are transformed and mutated (The Emperor, 2023; Giant's Dream, David's Self in the Gym Beam, 2024; Tears of Butterfly Wings, 2024; all 2024).

The painter is characterized by his grotesque style, absurd exaggeration, and expressive sharp color palette (green-blue face masks; purple twisted bodies, etc.). His paintings are full of monumental figures or hybrids amidst a symbolic night sky with stars, a sun-moon, where rays of enlightenment appear, along with beasts, snakes, skulls, swords, hands (gloves), numbers, emblems, and mysterious marks for the initiated. Here, individual signs, symbols, and images dance in a dynamic, almost cosmic whirl within a single pictorial field. Jakub Ružinský can connect the entire arsenal of burlesque, fictional primordial elements, and archetypes with his own life and "dreaming," skillfully projecting them onto the painting canvas. He is an artist who dreams in the middle of the day, a unique "daydreamer," focusing on his inner self and intimate psychic states. Sometimes, the painter himself appears on the canvases with his uncertain self-portrait. Here, he appears as a strange magician with a melancholic expression in a world full of symbols and hybrid alchemy (Autoportrait, 2022; Daydreamers, 2023; The Light of My Eyes in the Green Mirror’s Guise, 2024).

The exhibition is designed not only as a transition from room to room but also metaphorically as a saturated painting environment, an entrance gate, or a passage into another imaginary dimension with a strong painterly message. It sets up a critical or satirical mirror to today's "distorted" rationality (thus, gilded objects, mirrors, sand, etc., are also present). As the author aptly notes, the exhibition is "also a challenge to understand and seek dialogue with the collective unconscious and the language of symbols. The dream images in this project invite personal reflection and active engagement in a metamodern dialogue with the current challenges of society...".