Artists: Sofie Tobiášová and Adam Vít
Title: From A to X (too much love)
Venue: UNA, Milan
Photos: Michela Pedranti
The exhibition unfolds as an investigation into movement, instability, and identity as a condition in flux, addressing the contradictions embedded in the contemporary search for meaning and belonging —to a place, a practice, or to another person. Central to the show are themes of in-betweenness and uprootedness, experiences of foreignness, and the tension between rural and urban contexts. Walking operates as a critical gesture, while the road emerges as both a physical and symbolic space. From A to X (too much love) proposes a space of deceleration and reflection—a human-scale response to a world driven by acceleration and productivity.
Sofie Tobiášová presents a body of predominantly horizontal paintings, developed through cycles of action and denial, decision and erasure. Her painterly process unfolds as a layered temporal space, where uncertainty, failure, and loss are embraced as necessary components of creation. The works employ deliberately kitsch or emotionally “awkward” imagery—adolescent love, loneliness, heartbreak, snowy landscapes, star-filled nights, romantic icons—to uncover their latent emotional and aesthetic potential. Adolescence becomes a central reference point: a phase marked by transition, vulnerability, and quiet shame, echoing the experience of migration and arrival in a new country. The recurring figure of the young girl embodies a threshold—no longer a child, not yet an adult—burdened with desire, expectation, and external projections. Rather than illustrating specific formative events, the paintings evoke the emotional atmosphere of that time: confusion, tenderness, longing, and clumsy attempts at love.
The titles, drawn from love song lyrics, further anchor the works in an affective and temporal register. A recurring element in this new series of Tobiášová’s paintings is the color green, often appearing as a luminous accent. Ambiguous in nature, it evokes both urban alienation—recalling the nocturnal glow of neon lights—and the surrealist tradition, particularly the Czech avant-garde. The artist references figures such as Toyen and Jindřich Štyrský, whose trajectories of emigration and artistic struggle resonate with her own experience and subtly permeate the work.
Adam Vít’s practice explores an expanded conception of painting, focusing on how meaning and value are produced, displaced, and transformed. Through small gestures of layering and juxtaposition, his work engages with instability—in authorship, identity, and interpretation—while negotiating the tension between intimacy and structure. Through processes of reuse and recontextualization, the artist questions systems of presentation and representation within artistic production, alongside issues of economic exploitation, individuality, and identity.