Jan Šrámek is an artist, illustrator and graphic designer. Since 2006 he has been involved in VJing and under the pseudonym VJ Kolouch participates at many domestic and foreign festivals. He is mainly involved with experiments using animated film, vector graphic design, illustrations, and researching the relationship between the static and moving image. He collaborates closely with the artist Veronika Vlková and the animator Martin Búřil.
Šrámek tells stories that he places within an environment he knows well. As far back as his student work these locations are often on the boundaries of estates and countryside. Into this landscape he inserts model vehicles that we know from children’s comics. The model cars later become huge beetles occupying the landscape. The world is transformed into a game similar to when as children with fingers sticky with glue we wondered whether to exhibit our models in a case or whether to go to the sandbox with them, and sand, as in Šrámek’s works, always remained an unfulfilled desire in the landscape. However, Šrámek ends in this strange mood between responsibility and desire and allows the world to disappear. “What happened?” is perhaps the most appropriate question to ask of Šrámek’s works. Their form obliges us to look at them with the urgency of children, but their content symbolically references specific, historically possible albeit unrealised events, i.e. to the adult, experienced and experienced world. In the link between that desire and urgency there is an acceptance of responsibility for what we are unable to see through our actions and that is the surrounding landscape, nature, our planet.
Complexity is important in Šrámek’s work, be this the search for a form for the content of experimental films in which we works with symbolic references, but above all to his exhibitions that he puts together as though a single work. He links his video with objects, interactive installations and in a similar way connects with work with that of other artists, especially Veronika Vlková. At his first group exhibition Lost Perspective in Chodovská tvrz (2012) we see first the first combination of Šrámek’s technically and geometrically modelled computer graphics and Vlková’s subtle, poetic watercolours. Vlková’s mystic, ritualistic and shamanic world enters Šrámek’s apocalyptic visions. The gradual merger of these two styles (the exhibition Source, Fait Gallery, 2014) and their interest in history transformed the original question “What happened?” into “What could happen?” and becomes a parallel universe, one of many ends to an unrealised reality.
