Contradiction
Martin Kubica and Patrik Pelikán
30. 1. – 22. 2. 2026
opening: 29. 1. 2026 from 6 PM
a guided tour with the curator: 29. 1 2026 at 6.30 PM
curator: Martin Netočný
This exhibition is held together by contradiction. In classical logic, such a claim would be untenable: a contradiction refers to two abstract values that are mutually exclusive and therefore incapable of producing anything new together. Yet in the realm of real phenomena, difference is not an obstacle but a prerequisite for the emergence of a new whole.
This generative effect arises from the fact that the elements involved are not identical. Their dissimilarity produces a kind of material contradiction. To picture this more clearly, imagine a box of matches lying on a table. The table remains a table and the box remains a box precisely because they interact physically. Unlike abstract values, they share a surface that both connects and separates them. This shared boundary creates a dual relationship: the tension at the point of contact prevents the box from falling through the table, while simultaneously ensuring that the arrangement of the box does not dissolve into the arrangement of the table.
The reciprocity described above accounts for only part of the opening claim. On its own, it cannot ensure the formation of a coherent whole; it merely confirms that the table and the box are two distinct objects in contact. The picture shifts, however, when we look more closely. We discover that, beneath the surface coherence of these everyday things, it is their internal contradictions that bind them together and allow them to carry stable meaning.
Consider the simplest examples of pegs and screws. Each is an assemblage of disparate materials—wood, metal, glue—yet together they secure a tabletop and four legs into a single, legible form. A similar dynamic underlies the cohesion of the cellulose fibres that form the cardboard of a box, or the chemical adhesion that allows phosphorus to cling to the slender wood of a match.
Once we absorb this line of reasoning, the initial claim about the relationship between material inconsistency and the exhibition’s semantic integrity may begin to feel almost self‑evident—an idea concealed in slightly cryptic form. After all, the contradiction described here is not an anomaly but a foundational condition of the modern material world. It is also necessary to emphasize that artworks, too, are things. There is no reason to imagine that they are governed by principles distinct from those that shape the rest of material culture. The cellulose of a matchbox does not spontaneously fall apart, and neither do the oil pigments layered onto a canvas dissolve back into their constituent molecules. A painting remains intact through the same stabilizing tensions that keep any object in place. Even the act of hanging it on a wall depends on a nail driven into brick—an interaction of materials no different in principle from the screw that fastens a table’s leg to its top.
Despite these parallels with the everyday world, it is important to remember that we are not standing in a Jižní Město apartment, but in a gallery. The two parallel walls erected by Martin Kubica and Patrik Pelikán are not attempts to subdivide a rental interior and adapt the floor plan for new tenants. Instead, they prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the very walls that structure our lives. They invite us, as anthropologist Tim Ingold often suggests, to think from within. Such a shift requires us to suspend familiar categories—table, wall, box of matches—labels that normally stabilize objects through recognisable morphology. Here, we are asked to begin from the opposite direction. Rather than accepting these objects as ready‑made units of meaning, we are encouraged to examine the contradictions that constitute their material essence.
In order to facilitate this mental operation, a certain stimulus is required. A wall does not become a wall revealing its own interior simply because someone moves it from Jižní Město to a gallery frame. If the viewer is to thoroughly consider and analyze the contradictions, they must be appropriately pointed out. This means going back to the principles of building construction; touching on the basic assumptions and possibilities of the struggle against gravity, which humans have been waging for tens of thousands of years in an effort to improve their shelters or connect materials found at opposite ends of the cultural evolutionary chain. Simply put: to ask what exactly happens to our perception when a wall loses its historically conditioned solid character and becomes fragile, unstable, and in a sense unpredictable.
In this experiment, however, the original starting point should not be forgotten; grasping the internal contradictions of the wall should remain true to itself and not slip into the contradictions of the table or matchbox, let alone the creation of ruins. Kubica and Pelikán are aware of this fact, primarily because they have developed their research terrain from the nature of their own professions. In their roles as a sculpture restorer and a bricklayer, they create things on a daily basis and want to continue doing so here in the gallery. They are not interested in creating other artifacts, nor do they want to demolish anything. They want to build and connect, but unlike during working hours, they want to do so alternately as workers and as artists. Their intention is to return to the material contradictions that bricklaying or repairing sculptures brings to our world and to test the limits of their ultimate cohesion.
For the authors, Ingoldian thinking from within therefore means not only an excursion to the roots of modern everyday life, but also a distinctly introspective examination of their own contribution to the production of material culture. Their parallel walls—one based on Kubica's, the other on Pelikán's register—also differ so much in terms of construction that a comparison of the two sides further emphasizes the contradictions contained in each of them. Together, they form a contrast between order and entropy and represent another type of dialectical tension that both shapes and shatters the work. This unity in diversity is ultimately sealed by a unifying layer of plaster, which, in varying degrees of quality, covers the visible sides of the hobby market wood prisms and the massive splinter from a tree trunk split by lightning.
The exhibition’s exploration of contradiction unfolds not only on the micro‑scale of technological detail or the macro‑scale of architectural form. It also takes shape in a more immediately legible way—as a horizontal element that both links and stabilizes the two vertical structures. Contradiction here is not confined to the counterpressure of a screw joining two pieces of wood, nor to the chemical synthesis that binds materials at the molecular level. It also emerges through more archaic methods of joining, such as struts or shoring. The fact that Kubica and Pelikán's walls are braced against each other confirms that they do not interact randomly – like a box of matches and a table, for example – but form a single exhibition and structural composition. Yet a closer look reveals that even this bracing flirts with the limits of its own stability. We are thus confronted with a whole that coheres not despite its contradictions, but above all because it encourages us to explore them.
Martin Kubica (*1987) is an artist and restorer. He studied sculpture at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ostrava. His work engages with the fragmentation of material and space, often incorporating recycled components from discarded tools and building materials. In recent years, his practice has moved notably closer to the format of exhibition architecture—though typically in ways that test and question its established formal conventions. Kubica’s projects have been presented at venues such as PLATO Ostrava, the Pardubice City Gallery, and the Kurzor Gallery.
Patrik Pelikán (*1987) is an artist and bricklayer. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in the Drawing and Graphic Arts Studios and has been continuing his doctoral studies there since 2023. The central motif of his work is the construction of walls and the bricklayer's gesture. In the context of these practices, Pelikán explores expressions through which classic masonry materials can be transposed beyond the realm of pure instrumentality. He has exhibited at Gallery Jilská 14, Kabinet T., and SPZ Gallery.
The program of the Jeleni Gallery is possible through kind support of Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, Prague City Council, State Fund of Culture of the Czech Republic, City District Prague 7,
GESTOR – The Union for the Protection of Authorship
Media partners: ArtMap, artalk.cz, jlbjlt.net
