MARTIN KRAJC: TEMPTATIONS 28. 11.–12. 1. 2025

MARTIN KRAJC

TEMPTATIONS

The latest paintings by Martin Krajc were directly prompted by the Villa Pellé premises.
Summarising his long-term painting practice, Krajc’s large-format pictures bring immersive
visual experiences based on masterful painting technique and returning topics which refer to
the beginnings of his twenty-year creation, i.e. before he enrolled at the studio of Michael
Rittstein at Prague’s Academy of Fine Arts. During that period, he arrived at a sophisticated
painting concept raised from the blending of a charcoal drawing and acrylic paints, which has
recently been enriched by a coincidence – strong dense or transparent spots of the Balakryl
paint thrown on the canvas placed on the floor after completing the picture. Guiding the
audience into collective dreaming and escalated personal visions, Krajc’s paintings connect
diverse distant motifs that would hardly ever meet in the real world. The incentives draw from
the opposite layers of sight experiences, at times completely immediate, at other times
emerging from oblivion. The paintings are the intersections of the high and low, the crucial
and the negligible, the sumptuous and the volatile. The layered canvases connect the human
figure with the modernist architecture, the still life, and the landscape. Although they do not
show direct references to vanitas or memento mori, they are penetrated by a critical accent,
refer to the illusion of the permanent, and highlight the temporality and impermanence of
beauty, wealth, top sports performance, and tense modelling. They linger on the edge of
ecstasy, surrounded by all-expanding oblivion. This year, Krajc’s dialogue of increasingly
thought-through ways of depiction brought him to a synthetic position in which he developed
his fundamental idea “et ipsius mente”. His paintings free the audience from everyday
mediocrity.
For Villa Pellé, Martin Krajc has prepared a large collection of paintings, never-before-
exhibited, prefigured by several still lifes from 2022, which are followed by large-format
figural paintings in which still life often appears as an accompanying motif and which mostly
date from this year. Concurrently, opposed sets were created, highlighting the main scope of
the artist’s imagination: blurry views into renowned exhibition halls taken through
monumentalised outlines of girls’ bodies and triptychs blending all kinds of painting styles
from the Baroque to the Rococo and the present. In recent years, Krajc’s work has been
reflected within these opposite positions of expression, ranking him among the best
contemporary figurative painters.