The opening will take place at 6p.m. in C.0 HYB4 Galerie. Entrance to the gallery is through Kavárna Kampus.
Romantik z Jizerských hor se zasekl v Praze
Der Isergebirgsromantiker ist in Prag gestrandet / A Stranded Romantic from the Jizera Mountains
Aleš Novák (*1980, Prague) is a painter, sculptor, and architect whose work has long operated on the threshold between spiritual inquiry and the visual reflection of landscape. His practice oscillates between the physical experience of nature and the intellectual articulation of space—between body, landscape, and image.
The term pendler refers to a person who lives in one country and regularly crosses a border to work in another. In a symbolic sense, Novák can also be understood as such a commuter: an artist who daily traverses an imagined boundary between two worlds. On one side lies home—a space shaped by the symbiosis of nature, inner freedom, and silence; on the other, the urban biotope, offering infrastructures of communication, social systems, and the inevitability of economic reality.
The parallel between the commuter and the romantic artist is therefore evident. Yet the point is not merely leaving the safety of the familiar in order to make a living. What matters is the journey itself—the process of moving between worlds. Within this movement the artist becomes a medium: an intermediary through whom the experience of landscape and time is translated into image. The openness to an intensified perception of reality that this process requires may, within the context of contemporary rhythms of life, appear almost as an alternative mode of being.
Novák’s painting is above all a physical and haptic record of encounters with landscape. The gestures, textures, and material layers on the canvas bear traces of struggle—an energetic collision between the external world and its internal reflection. The processual character of the painting is therefore not merely a technique but a form of experience: a way of not only depicting the landscape but reliving it.
The motivation behind the work lies in the search for equilibrium between the inner and the outer world. In this process the artist becomes both mirror and mediator—someone who translates the experience of landscape into the language of visual communication. The gallery space thus transforms into a site where this experience is reconstituted: between painting, object, and installation emerges a dynamic field in which intuition encounters deliberate composition.
With time, Novák’s capacity to communicate with the world he encounters has grown clearer and more assured. Yet it remains inseparable from the journey itself—a continuous process of searching, without which there would ultimately be nothing to share.
The exhibition is taking place from 11. 4. 2026 to 23. 5. 2026. C.0 HYB4 Galerie is open from Monday to Saturday 10a.m.-8p.m.
Curator: Filip Kazda
Media partner: ArtMap, Kudyznudy.cz
