We met in the Prague art center MeetFactory, where Michal Škapa set up his studio on the floor above the gallery more than ten years ago, and settled down near two large canvases intended for an exhibition in Norway. He had been working on them just a moment before.
The Code Keeper exhibition in the town of Sandvika near Oslo is now in full swing and will last until mid-June. It is part of the MOT Prague project, which presents Czech culture to Norwegian audiences.
Have you ever exhibited in Scandinavia?
No, I haven’t even been to any Scandinavian countries yet, so I’m quite looking forward to it. Curator Radek Wohlmuth, with whom I often collaborate and who has been following the local street art and graffiti scene for years, contributed to this. Among other things, he runs the Lapidárium gallery in the Broumov monastery, and since Broumov now has a partnership with Baerum Kulturhus in Sandvik, he invited me to that project as well.
Photo: archive of the artist – Tomáš Brabec
An image with neon tubes
I see you have all kinds of clippings and photos of architecture in Oslo…
Preparatory collages are my regular practice, I use a lot of my own photos, but also various architectural and other publications that I collect or the internet.
Is there a story attached to those buildings?
No, I proceeded completely intuitively. But I consider all my paintings to be largely narrative and story-telling. When you look at one of my cities, you can theoretically get lost in it endlessly and find yourself again.
Various short texts also often appear on buildings or their fragments.
If a person had the mood and patience to go through the picture in his mind, he could read and discover a little in it. Sometimes they even discover pieces of song lyrics.
Do you often play music while painting like you do right now?
Music is closely related to my work. Sometimes I record my diary entries, messages or various messages that I find interesting in the paintings. And all this is often related to music. Before I start painting, I often hear something first, and the way it sounds in my head, it awakens a certain mood in me, or it gives me an idea. So, to a certain extent, I proceed by the method of controlled chance when painting.
Photo: archive of the artist – David Michálek
An image with neon tubes
You work with a special font on some images. Apparently it has something to do with graffiti?
This is my own font that started to hit the world sometime in 2005 when I visited South America. There I got acquainted with a strange graffiti subculture that uses similar signs. I liked them and sketched them. Later I digitized them so that they could be written on the computer.
Then I let it sleep for a while, and a few years later, when I got serious about painting in the studio, I remembered it. I then completed the alphabet and started using it in pictures. Eventually I mastered it to the level of a kind of handwriting, so I can write with it and reverse and decode the writing.
Are you the only one who can read your handwriting, or does someone else know it?
People often ask me that, but I won’t reveal the letter key. I’d like to keep it a secret. It’s based on the Latin alphabet, but each character is slightly customized. Sometimes I’ll show someone something, and once they get the hang of it, they could read quite easily in that time.
In addition to paintings with larger letters, I also had periods in the past where I wrote small text in concentric circles on the canvas. Basically, it’s a kind of analogy with some modern notation. Whether it’s vinyl, CD, or hard disk, everything is based on the same recording system.
Lately I’ve also been working with neon tubes, so I add colored light to the images with these ciphers.
Photo: archive of the artist – Tomáš Brabec
He created one of the largest murals two years ago on the wall near the Prague airport.
How did you get into graffiti in the first place?
I started writing on the walls in the early nineties. Prague looked completely different then, it was just recovering from the gray, long era of communism and closed borders. As soon as they opened, a lot of influences from the west started coming here, including graffiti. I was a teenager and it got me excited. Whenever I discovered graffiti on the streets of Prague, I felt like I had found a treasure, and I often returned to it.
Of course, it seems laughable today, but back then we had no other resources. The Internet didn’t exist yet, and when we were interested in graffiti, we had to go abroad and look at the streets there. But it was all the more interesting and adventurous for us. Later, people from Berlin, which was the closest western metropolis for us, started coming here, the Berlin scene started to influence and inspire even more here. Including music.
What did you think about visual artists as a young writer? Could you imagine that one day you will also lock yourself in a studio and start sketching on canvas instead of on the walls?
Although I walked the streets with spray paint, but at the same time I grew up in a cultural environment, thanks to my parents I watched exhibitions and a lot of other interesting things. After a while, I no longer had such an urge to paint outside and around 2010 I started to focus on studio work.
I realized very quickly that I couldn’t just bring the things I was doing in the streets inside and onto the canvas, and I had to find another location. On the one hand, it is much more focused work, where you can immerse yourself in your inner world for a long time. On the other hand, you have to give up direct communication with the viewer and you will only experience it during the exhibition. That’s why I often and like to do guided tours.
Photo: archive of the artist – Tomáš Brabec
