Tomas Jetela: Process, Mortality, and a Defining Work
Jetela’s influences extend across centuries, encompassing figures such as Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Caspar David Friedrich, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, and Lucian Freud, alongside numerous contemporary artists including George Condo and Jenny Saville. Some influences operate beneath the surface, shaping sensibility rather than form, while others engage directly with his current concerns. Beyond art history, his practice absorbs stimuli from daily life, dreams, digital environments, literature, film, and chance encounters. These inputs are translated into drawings, collages, photographs, and digital modifications, forming a reservoir of visual material that feeds the painting process in layered and sometimes complex ways.
Among the most profound influences on his work is personal confrontation with mortality. Experiences situated near the boundary between life and death altered not only his artistic outlook but his perception of existence itself. Such moments stripped away superficial fears and recalibrated his sense of value, replacing assumed confidence with a deeper, more resilient belief in self. This awareness permeates his paintings, infusing them with urgency and existential gravity. The themes of fragmentation, inner monsters, and psychological unrest gain additional depth when understood through this lens, becoming not abstract concepts but lived realities translated into visual form.
A pivotal example of this evolution appears in the painting A Virgin Unicorn Crawling in the Dark Corners of the Aphrodisiac Universe from 2022, created with oil and acrylic on canvas at a monumental scale of 190 by 140 centimeters. Emerging from the Magic Monsters series, this work crystallized several new directions. Massive deformation, abstraction, painterly quotation, and multiperspectival structure converge to articulate ideas of split identity and perceptual instability. This painting marked a turning point, leading to more systematic exploration of these attributes in subsequent cycles. Each new series builds upon discoveries from the previous one, balancing analytical structure with intuition and controlled chance. Through this evolving process, Jetela continues to expand a body of work that remains open, adaptive, and deeply engaged with the complexities of contemporary existence.
