Matěj Lipavský primarily devotes his time to open air painting. He is mostly interested in the natural light and in his unmediated experience in the free, open space. His favourite is scattered light because it is (in the artist’s words) “equal for all colours”, it fills the image plans, dilutes sharp contours of shapes and markedly contributes to the unification of local colour and composition of the entire motive.
At the same time, however, we can see in his work updating paraphrases in the direction of emphasizing the rhythm of his painting style, the light order in the span between the depth and width of the landscape area (e.g. paintings of seaside landscape that originated in Island), as well as the density and filled completeness of the motive reflecting in numerous paintings with the subject of gardens or city landscapes.
Just as important is the actual topic of the relationship between the subject and reality of painting – between the imitation of the seen and the truth of the painted contained primarily in the creative gesture, stroke of a brush and the choice of the colour composition. In his often wintry toned, acrylic painted canvases he focuses on simple, non-dramatic and non-exclusive cut-outs of landscape. The emphasis on the whole, eliminating details is the result of the artist’s movement between sharpening and non-sharpness, importance and marginality, order and freedom, naturalness and artificiality, and on a general level even between seeing and thinking. His tendency towards unpretentiousness and at the same time non-invasive ambiguous conception is very important in this context.
Matěj Lipavský is neither concerned with challenging fashion reinterpretations of diverse cultural contexts nor with simple and flattening confirmation of traditions often functioning as a substitute for certainty and taste. When he speaks about the fundaments of painting, he speaks of them as the foundation “not alleviated of tradition and yet innovative in fineness” – like about something that is aware of its own history but at the same that does not allow itself to be tied down with the responsibility for it, instead it consciously and confidently builds on it precisely for the reason to be able to use its possibilities and experiences in new contexts and situations.
Matěj Lipavský consistently searches for such painting formulations in which everydayness is not perceived as a cloak covering some sort of more realistic, higher and cleaner values, but as an unignorable prerequisite for all (also artistic) applications to the world of things. To a world that in its undifferentiated ordinariness has to be re-introduced every time to our eyes in order for us to be able to repeatedly see it as something unique but also as the only real place of our residence in the world.
