Jan Vytiska: An Artist Should Keep at Least One Important Work from Every Period

“They say art is a better investment than gold these days,” says Jan Vytiska, one of the Czech Republic’s most acclaimed contemporary painters. We meet at the café in Kampus Hybernská, next to his temporary studio, where he works on his fictional worlds, combining folk aesthetics with pagan elements, pop culture, and dark symbolism. During our conversation, he recalls the first painting he ever sold, his need to weave a broad spectrum of emotions into his work, and the formative moments that shaped his distinctive visual language. He also explains how the Czech and international art markets work, reflects on the differences between the worlds of visual art and music, recalls an unusual request from a collector, and observes that as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly present in painting, he senses a growing desire for craftsmanship and the handmade.

Do you remember the first painting you ever sold?

Yeah. It’s actually a pretty good story. Krištof Kintera bought it. He said at the time that it was the first painting he had ever bought for his collection, which I thought was amazing. It was at an exhibition organised by my friend Vincek on Krymská, in this hotel that housed a gallery and a club at the time. I think Kintera still has a studio somewhere around Krymská, where students and young artists come and go.

The painting showed a Wallachian man on a rocking horse, with a line from Beck: “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.” I was going through a particular phase back then — visually, it looked a little like Lada. It was this punky, trashy kind of painting. I guess that’s what he liked about it — that genuine punk quality.

What year was that?

Around 2008 or 2010, somewhere around then. It’s been a long time.

That must have been a moment when you realised you were clearly heading in the right direction with your art, given that one of the country’s most acclaimed artists had taken an interest in it. Do you remember how much you sold it for?

I was thrilled, obviously. I was just starting out at the time, so it meant a lot to me. I don’t remember the exact price anymore, but I think it was somewhere around 12–15 thousand crowns. Which felt like an enormous amount of money to me back then — especially for the first painting I’d ever sold.

That must have been great PR as well: “Kintera bought my first painting.”

I mentioned it in a few interviews, so the story got “recycled” a little. He mentioned it himself in an interview once too, so I recently shared it on social media as a funny anecdote.

Do you buy work by other artists yourself?

Sometimes. Mostly prints or smaller pieces. If something really grabs me, I’ll buy it.

Do you see it as an investment, or is it more about buying something simply because you like it?

Primarily because I like it. If I had loads of money, I’d happily have an apartment full of paintings by young artists. But the two things often go hand in hand — if something is good and you genuinely like it, it usually already has a certain value of its own. Above all, an emotional value, which I think is the most important one.

Do you find it difficult to part with your paintings when you sell them?

Not at first, because when you don’t have much money, you don’t really think about it. I used to tell myself, “If it sells, you’ll just make another one — and it’ll be better.” But eventually, I started to regret letting some of them go. Otto Urban, a curator at DOX, once told me that an artist should keep at least one important work from every period. A key piece that serves as a record of that particular phase. I wasn’t doing that at all back then because I genuinely needed the money. Looking back, there are probably some works I would have kept.

Do you have any idea how many paintings you’ve made and sold altogether?

Not at all. I honestly have no idea. I’ve never counted them. There aren’t many left in the studio, though, so I’ve definitely sold quite a few.

And speaking of collecting and buying other artists’ work — I collect these traditional folk textiles.

The kind you hang on the wall?

Yeah. Woven folk textiles, from somewhere in the Balkans, Serbia or around there. They use them on benches, on walls… It’s neither quite a rug nor a tablecloth, but something in between. I used to live in Anděl, and I completely fell in love with them at the Kolbenova flea market. I started collecting them with this idea that I’d cover an entire room in them, like textile wallpaper.

I collected quite a lot, but I never actually finished the project — some disappeared, others got lost while moving. And because I have these textiles all over my apartment now, there’s barely any room left for paintings.

Given the kind of paintings you make — often quite dark — is it important to you what emotions they evoke in the viewer?

Absolutely. In the beginning, I deliberately wanted to make darker, melancholic, mournful, almost tearful things. But gradually, I started thinking that the ideal would be to get the broadest possible spectrum of emotions into a painting.

That’s almost impossible, because a painting is static — it will always primarily convey one particular mood. But I’d like it to contain grotesque elements, humour, melancholy, horror… everything you experience in life. A painting usually communicates one dominant emotion, but I’d like to fit more of them in there, and I think some of my work does contain that range. Some pieces are darker, others more humorous — sometimes only through the title, sometimes through the subject matter. Ideally, a single painting would contain the entire spectrum, but I’m not sure how to achieve that.

Do you look for something similar in other artists’ work — something that makes you feel “fulfilled”?

With other artists, I think I’m even more fascinated by narrative than by emotion. More than technique or “content” in the traditional sense. My own work isn’t purely painterly in that physical, material sense — I’m not the kind of painter who builds up thick layers of paint. I approach it more postmodernly, almost as an illustration of a story or a fairy tale.

I love films, for example. Sometimes you pause a film on a single frame and it works as a painting in its own right. I occasionally take screenshots of landscapes or scenes and use them as references. I’m not afraid of references, whether cultural or pop-cultural. I also made a series called HD Resolution, where I deliberately worked with the proportions of a film frame — wide, like a cinema screen.

Which films have you drawn from, for example? Are those references still legible to viewers who don’t know the original source?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I had a painting of a person on fire, for example — that was a reference to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later. It’s a zombie film, but what interested me more was the apocalyptic atmosphere.

Then I made paintings of burned-out houses, these suburban landscapes after some kind of catastrophe. Those were inspired by The Road, directed by Australian filmmaker John Hillcoat and based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel. I did more of that kind of thing earlier in my career. I don’t work with references quite so directly anymore, but the influence of cinema is still there.

I immediately thought of The Shining, which has such visually distinctive scenes that they would fit quite naturally into your world.

Yeah, I like King. I’ve both read and listened to a lot of his work. I often listen to audiobooks while I paint, and King works particularly well for that. He’s expansive — he likes to build characters, entire towns, that kind of “metaphorical evil” that permeates a place.

I read the sequel to The Shining, Doctor Sleep, which is good too. Right now, I’m listening to The Outsider, which was adapted into an HBO series. And I have to say, it’s one of the best Stephen King adaptations. Most films based on King’s work aren’t particularly good, but this one is an exception.

When did you realise that your paintings needed to have a distinctive visual language — something that would make people immediately recognise a work as yours?

That was back in the MySpace days. It was this incredibly enthusiastic phase of the internet, full of profiles of bands and small independent artists from all over the world that I loved following. There was a kind of global visual vocabulary emerging there — a lot of the things that are popular among young artists today were already taking shape back then. I was making similar little drawings to everyone else, and I thought it was great. But then I realised it was a style that existed everywhere, and I wasn’t interested in simply becoming part of it.

I wanted to make something local, specific, rooted in a particular place. I was fascinated by melancholy and Czech decadence, cottages, Wallachia, traditional timber houses… I thought that if I used this environment — cottages, hills, forests — it would automatically create a very particular atmosphere. And once you add colour and symbols, you can take it into completely different territory.

At the same time, I don’t make “pure folklore.” It’s more of a fictional world in which these things take place. There’s the present day, references to pop culture, music, literature. I keep saying how much I love Bob Dylan — the way he works with Woody Guthrie’s folk aesthetic while bringing in his own surreal, narrative lyrics. It’s a postmodern mix. If I were just making folklore — girls in traditional costumes — it would be boring. I try to make it feel as though it exists “behind the wall” — somewhere between a pagan space beyond good and evil and the contemporary world.

At the beginning of the interview, you said you try to bring the widest possible range of emotions into your paintings. You’re also a member of the band Body of Pain, so I was wondering whether you started making music as a way of expressing emotions that might be harder to communicate through painting?

For me, music really comes from being a huge fan. It’s what happens when you love something so much that at some point you simply can’t help yourself and start doing it too. From the age of sixteen, I used to go to the legendary punk club Vrah. I was used to going to gigs constantly — sometimes three times a week. That’s stayed with me. I still love following the scene and discovering new things. It’s one of the advantages of living in a big city, and I try to make the most of it.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of culture you consume?

I’m like an addict when it comes to this. I need bigger and bigger doses to feel satisfied. It fascinates me and I love it. I’m actually at a point where I enjoy consuming other people’s work much more than making my own. Of course I still enjoy making my own work, but what I mean is that I’m no longer so self-centred that I focus only on what I’m doing. I’m fascinated by the work of other artists. And I think that’s how it should be.

Do you think that’s because you’ve reached some kind of personal milestone?

No. I just really enjoy consuming pop culture, underground culture, everything around it. If I only looked at my own ego, I’d see one tiny part of the picture. This way, I feel more like I’m part of a larger organism.

If you compare the two worlds you create in — music and visual art — which do you think is harder to break into, or to make a living from?

The music scene is brutally difficult in that respect. Making a living from it here is almost impossible. Maybe if I had a band playing something more “accessible” to a wider audience, it would be easier. But in smaller scenes, fees are often undervalued. People simply aren’t paid as much as they deserve. In visual art, at least you have the possibility of selling individual works.

In music, people often say that if you want to break into the mainstream, you have to adapt to the audience and sacrifice some of your independence. Does something similar happen in visual art?

That’s a difficult question. In visual art, you can also make what I call “sofa paintings” — something designed to look good above someone’s couch. A certain type of work that sells well in newly developed apartments. I’m not saying those works are necessarily bad, but they’re calculated for a specific market.

Then there’s the other side of it: being represented by serious galleries. They’re looking for something with a different kind of potential. There isn’t really one clear formula for how it works.

Do you ever make paintings on commission? Someone saying, “I want a giant melting eye covering the entire wall”?

That doesn’t really work for me. But once I visited a collector who liked one of my paintings. He said he’d like to buy it, but he had a phobia of snakes and there were too many snakes in the painting, so he asked whether I could paint over them somehow. I laughed and asked if he was out of his mind. I explained that the snakes had a symbolic meaning within the work and belonged there.

In the end, it all worked out. His father liked the painting and bought it instead. Happy ending.

Is there a difference between Czech and international collectors?

I mostly see that world indirectly through my brother, Vojtěch Kovařík, who is currently one of the best-selling Czech artists internationally. Through him, I can see that it really is a business. They say art is a better investment than gold these days. And in his case, you can really see it — there are clear calculations behind what will sell and where.

And are your paintings bought by international collectors as well, or mostly by Czech ones?

My collectors are predominantly Czech. I think I’ve only exhibited abroad once, as part of a kind of cultural exchange that took place in several cities — Bucharest, Berlin, for example. But that was back in 2018.

Why do you think that is?

I think it has a lot to do with how these scenes operate. Every country has its own circles of people who have been active there for years, and breaking into them from the outside is simply difficult. They can be quite closed — there’s the Czech scene, the German scene… and they tend to stick together. To break into one from the outside, you really have to offer something exceptional.

Or the gallerist has to see genuine commercial potential in your work. That’s ultimately crucial — galleries need to sell. My brother is represented by Galerie Gerdel, and his gallerist was showing him work by various artists, not just Czech ones. There was this Polish artist, a total hardcore punk, who makes incredible work. And the gallerist said, “It’s great, but it won’t sell.” And that’s what ultimately makes the difference.

Do you feel that your name is established enough on the Czech scene that you don’t have to worry as much about promotion and social media anymore? Or is PR and social media simply a never-ending story?

It’s a never-ending story. In that sense, artists often have to be quite self-made — you have to handle a lot of things yourself. I collaborate with people occasionally, but somehow I always end up doing PR in my own way anyway.

Over the past year, there’s been a lot of discussion about the potential impact of artificial intelligence on art. Does it worry you?

I don’t think it will become a genuine competitor to painting. Of course, plenty of people use AI as a tool — to generate references, lighting, shadows, scenes. If you generate an image to see how one object might cast a shadow onto another, for example, that can be useful. That’s perfectly fine. But the idea that people will start buying AI-generated images printed on canvas en masse… I don’t really believe that.

It’s already a bigger topic in music. I keep seeing stories on social media claiming things like 99% of listeners can’t distinguish AI-generated music from music made by humans. But I don’t pay much attention to those clickbait AI articles. They constantly appear in my feed, and they often come from questionable sources anyway.

If anything, I think we’ll see a growing desire for craftsmanship — for things that are visibly made by hand. I can already see it happening in painting: figurative work and classically constructed images are returning, almost pre-modern in a way. For years, people talked about the “death of painting”… and now AI has arrived as yet another supposed “death,” while paradoxically helping to revive it at the same time.

I think AI is very good at imitating a style, but it often fails to produce anything genuinely good. If you tell it, “Make me a painting in the style of Picasso,” it might look the part, but it lacks that sense of life.

When we were talking about developing your visual language — did anyone at art school influence it directly? Was there someone who helped shape you?

I had Jiří Surůvka as a professor at the faculty. He was quite a character. Very much his own person, and he let us grow almost “like trees in a forest.” He knew what we were doing, but he didn’t interfere with it.

He could be brutally honest — he might simply say, “This is shit.” But he would say it in a way that didn’t offend you. You’d laugh, and then you’d think about it. There was humour in it, while at the same time he was pointing you towards a possible way forward. Being able to say something that directly without humiliating someone is incredibly important. It sounds very harsh when I describe it like this, but he was critical in a good way. He reflected on what you were doing rather than trying to reshape it.

I actually only started painting there — before that, I was doing sculpture. In the new media studios, I was making projections for bands, a kind of “Czech answer to Crystal Castles,” and painting gradually started emerging alongside that.

I remember sitting in Surůvka’s office once, having a cigarette, when he showed me a book about American naïve folk art. It featured settlers who had arrived from Europe and were building a new world. It had a huge influence on me — those naïve paintings of cottages, fields, this idea of a “new life.” It reminded me a lot of Wallachia, just transplanted to America.

I’m also fascinated by Horace Pippin — a Black American painter who created naïve but incredibly powerful interiors and scenes. His rooms remind me of our “empty timber cottages” — there’s a similar melancholy, just in a completely different context. And then, of course, there’s Trnka, Czech fairy tales, that dark existential world of devils, forests, and cottages. All of that lives somewhere inside me.

Do you give advice to younger artists yourself?

Honestly, I’d be wary of telling other people what to do with their work. You have to find your own way there. Sometimes I talk to younger artists and they show me their work, but I’d rather share my experience than try to “shape their visual language” for them.

And finally, ALEXMONHART has a fragrance collection based on different personality types: The Raver, The Thinker, The Ritualist, The Minimalist, The Dreamer, and The Avantgardist. Which of these personalities are you, apart from The Blasphemer?

The Raver, obviously. Great name.

Article by Kristina Kratochvílová