“Since leaving school, I’ve struggled to describe the visual content of things.” (Julius Reichel, Budoucnost je děsivý místo / The Future is a Scary Place, Galerie Dolmen, 2020) If we try to describe Reichel’s individual works in terms of their visual content, we slip into a superficial naming and miss their layered depth. The artist’s works consist, among other things, of layering, the formation of codes, and a complex conception of the contemporary world. Julius Reichel’s language involves generated hashtags, concepts, slogans, memes, signs. He becomes an interpreter of what he calls “post-internet ballast”, and his work should be perceived through linguistics. The emphasis placed beyond the visual aspect of the work offers new possibilities of reading, which in this case becomes literal. The reader is in a position to attempt to decipher the individual codes, to fit them into threads familiar to them, and to create new interconnections, thus allowing Reichel’s work to impact actively on them, like “disks in a computer” (JR). The contemporaneity of the artist’s work lies in its indefinability.
Rather than through its own visual impact, which in this case may appear too literal, Reichel’s work is more appropriately perceived as action-movement, often accompanied by words or text. For example, at the 2019 Vienna Contemporary Art Fair, where he exhibited under the aegis of Prague’s Karpuchina Gallery, over the course of three days Reichel covered the white walls of the exhibition booths with randomly generated slogans and signs. This was performative freestyle poetry mixed with elements of vandalism and the transience characteristic of graffiti – at the end of the fair the booths were, of course, to be handed back in their original, untouched, white cube state. The same process had taken place at the exhibition VDIFF at the House of the Lords of Kunštát a few months earlier. During the opening, Reichel had given a live performance during which he covered all of the walls and other objects visible in the space. This well nigh obsessive approach to production and branding is deeply rooted in the artist given his experience with the graffiti scene, which is characterised, inter alia, by movement in space combined with painting. Pseudonyms, which, in addition to providing writers with a certain degree of protection, also offer them the opportunity to make a name for themselves (literally) on the scene, can in turn be likened to calligraphy. The pseudonym chosen determines the letter-sign-symbol tag, which the creator then writes publicly and shapes in a distinctive way. The name Julius Reichel, which appears sporadically in the artist’s work beneath his initials, is a pseudonym. Reichel adopted it in 2003 from his grandfather when living in the latter’s former apartment in České Budějovice. “I sign handover protocols with it, paintings. A lot of people aren’t aware that it’s not my real name.” (Julius Reichel, Budoucnost je děsivý místo / The Future is a Scary Place, Dolmen Gallery, 2020) As on the graffiti scene, the main purpose of the pseudonym Julius Reichel is the tag, the lettering.
Another possible angle from which to approach Reichel’s work is the material he uses. In addition to canvases, it is fabric he returns to regularly. At the start of his career, he used fabric as a canvas for financial reasons (the lower price allowed him to produce more). However, over time it became the actual subject of the artwork. An example of this is the series Balíky / Bundles of 2012, which was exhibited in the same year as part of the exhibition Apocalypse Now! at the House of the Lords of Kunštát. The work featured various items of clothing tied into bundles, which were freely available for disassembly at the opening. Before that, Reichel had also situated the series in public spaces (e.g. a car park in České Budějovice or alongside the E55 motorway), where the installation, like the exhibition mentioned above, had a lifespan of only a few hours. He drew on a similar principle in 2018 at the exhibition Dark Energy / Ego Death Death Planet / Void Trap Save the Future? with Matyáš Maláč at Holešovice Šachta. He scattered “hypebeast” trainers all around the gallery and visitors were able to take away a pair for themselves during the opening. Both events were more performance-like in character, deliberately creating a situation that reflected the behaviour of today’s materially obsessed society. The official openings acquired an atmosphere familiar from viral videos, in which crowd frenzy occurs during extreme sales and free goods giveaways. The situation at the second such opening was all the more comical because pairs of shoes were separated and scattered around the space, which could have led to conflict between visitors attempting to grab a trainer from someone else in order to form a pair.
These “games” form an integral part of Reichel’s work. The humour to be found in his performances and happenings can turn into hysteria in a second, as is so in the case of the most watched online videos, which are supposed to be anything but boring. Reichel operates with the over-saturation of today’s world, with his own demons and his own position in the intricacies of this infrastructure, and in between all of this he swims the crawl within a visual and data smog. In this sense, the paintings under his own trademark 5G painting (there are even references to 12G painting in his current work) can be abstracted to mere source codes-transmission-energy created during this process. Action-movement is fundamental to Reichel’s work. His early interventions in public space such as Zahalení / Drape (2011), Stoleček – Modrý / Stool – Blue (2012), Odpadky – Linie / Trash – Lines (2012) and Žebříky / Ladders (2014), for instance, always involve the disruption of an establish, fixed order. Žebříky, for example, featured thirteen six-metre ladders scattered around the town of Poděbrady, Stoleček – Modrý comprised a spontaneously placed stool between two absurdly situated benches, and in Volby – Plakáty / Elections – Posters (2012) the artist again cut out and discarded the eyes on the posters of French politicians on the streets of Marseille. Reichel uses space, whether indoors or outdoors, to overturn, paint, describe, negate or manipulate, since, as in the virtual world, almost anything is possible in the physical world today.
