MARTIN JANECKÝ: DREAMER

Dreamer, Martin Janecký’s solo exhibition at KodlContemporary, approaches portraiture as a space between individual likeness and a more universal image of human experience. Working primarily through inside sculpting in glass, Janecký creates faces and figures whose physical precision is accompanied by a sense of psychological distance. The portrait becomes both an encounter with another person and a surface onto which questions of memory, vulnerability and self-recognition can be projected.

Glass plays a central role in this tension. Its transparency suggests openness, yet the material simultaneously encloses and separates. Janecký works from within the hot glass, shaping facial features and bodily forms through a technically demanding process in which the image gradually emerges from the material itself. Portrait, mask and sculptural object begin to overlap.

The exhibition’s title work, Dreamer I (2025), develops this ambiguity through a figure absorbed in an internal narrative that appears to unfold externally. Two pigeons are caught in conflict; one falls as its wings cease to function. The scene combines stillness with latent violence, giving physical form to the anxiety contained within the dream.

Throughout the exhibition, the human face operates less as a stable representation of identity than as a threshold between interior and exterior states. Janecký’s figures appear present and withdrawn at the same time. Their expressions invite recognition while withholding any definitive narrative about who they are.

The exhibition architecture by Petr Kolář and lighting by Pavla Beranová extend this relationship between visibility and intimacy into the gallery space. The openness of the architecture gradually gives way to more concentrated encounters with individual works, allowing the exhibition to shift between collective observation and private confrontation.

Dreamer treats portraiture as a form of distance as much as proximity. Looking at another face becomes a way of momentarily stepping outside oneself, while the transparency of glass makes visible the paradox at the centre of the exhibition: that seeing more does not necessarily mean knowing more.