When you close your eyes, it does not mean you stop seeing
Michael Nosek: Afterimage
18 September – 18 October 2025
Afterimage is the first solo exhibition of painter Michael Nosek (*1990), who has drawn public attention in recent years, among other things, with his expressive embroidered masks. At Bold Gallery he now presents his latest works, positioned on the uncertain threshold between painting and drawing, abstraction and figuration, tension and calm. The title Afterimage can be understood as the eye’s memory – a luminous imprint that lingers even after the stimulus has disappeared. But it can just as well denote the attempt to capture a fleeting state of mind or a life stage that is irreversibly gone.
Text: Eva Bláhová
How many layers do we put on and take off in the course of a single day, sometimes within a single moment? The older we get, the more roles we inhabit: we wake up as parents, partners, shift into our professional identities, slip into the roles of friends, daughters, sons… Similarly, Michael Nosek’s works in Afterimage contain many more layers than those that meet the eye at first glance. While the initial impression of his exhibited pieces might evoke impressionistic seaside landscapes, what I see in them is the experience of a father of a small child, moving daily through the turbulence of emotions – from explosions of love to explosions of despair. In my view, Michael’s paintings – beyond the extraordinary visual experience – open up the theme of fatherhood in today’s (Czech) society, extending well beyond the field of contemporary art. For this reason, my reflection on Afterimage considers two facets of Nosek’s artistic identity: Nosek the Artist, and Nosek the Artist-Father.
Nosek – the Artist
At the heart of Afterimage is a series of seventeen drawings on tinted paper, produced between spring 2024 and summer 2025. They are complemented by a large-scale black-and-white drawing depicting an apocalyptic vision, and a digital print enlarged from a page of Michael’s sketchbook, installed on the gallery’s entrance wall. Together, this selection demonstrates his ability to span figurative realism and expressive abstraction. Whatever medium he works with (or even when simply tidying up tools in his studio), he places great emphasis on meticulous craftsmanship and technical precision.
Nosek studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, which he still regards as his “royal discipline.” Yet painting is also a source of constant inner conflict: he is drawn to its technical and craft-based demands and achieves remarkable results in it, but after a time it begins to feel suffocating, pushing him to seek other forms of expression. In recent years, for instance, his embroidered masks have gained considerable attention, presented in several group exhibitions.
Nosek – the Artist-Father
The subjects of Nosek’s work emerge from his inner world, everyday life, and human relationships. Subtle symbolic references also reveal his interests in twentieth-century philosophy, adventure literature, art history, and religion. In recent years, however, a new life role has begun to enter his practice with irresistible force: fatherhood.
Nosek works in a Smíchov studio alongside his partner, the artist Eliška Konečná. The two are not part of any formal art group, working instead in isolation, yet finding inspiration in similar sources: late Renaissance Italian painting, Zdeněk Burian’s drawings, impressionism. Their son Kaspar is three years and three months old (to the date of the opening of the exhibition). The series of exhibited works was created when he was an infant and toddler. Michael found himself in the role of primary caregiver – a position that, for his generation of millennials, is still clawing its way toward broader social recognition. This is a generation with few caregiving male role models either in immediate surroundings or in public life. My first conversations with Michael about the exhibition ended with exchanges about early parenthood: our children are the same age, and both of us face the same volatile mix of love and frustration that comes with caring for a toddler. We maximize our efforts in the carefully carved-out stretches of time we manage to secure.
This new role inevitably shapes Michael’s practice: there is simply no time for the long process of painting – stretching canvas, priming, layering underpaint, waiting for coats to dry. In this period he also produced a small series of self-portraits, showing the face of an exhausted young man – the embodiment of frustration and fatigue. These portraits were originally meant to be part of the installation, but we ultimately chose not to exhibit them in order to preserve the show’s visual cohesion.
Afterimage
Nosek thus pares painting down to its essence – drawing. He developed his own technique of working on tinted paper, creating a softly textured ground of warm hues by spraying paint across its surface. This colored ground resembles “afterimages” or phosphenes – the shimmering patterns we see when we close our eyes. On these flickering surfaces he repeatedly sketches a recurring motif: a seascape bathed in the light of the setting sun.
The exhibition also includes one of the black-and-white drawings that preceded the colored works. It shows an idyllic lake landscape with a sailboat drifting calmly, while above, a destructive storm gathers and a demonic harbinger of doom takes shape on the horizon. All of Nosek’s “preparatory” black-and-white drawings explicitly portray looming apocalypse. A recurring figure is the shipwrecked survivor clinging to a piece of timber, aware of their impending death while simultaneously watching a meteor approach – realizing that the end extends beyond their personal fate to all terrestrial life. (Yes, such visions can emerge from the exhaustion-fueled imagination of a new parent!).
This moment is crucial: until now we might read Nosek’s images as expressions of grappling with the loss of his pre-fatherhood self. Yet the personal cannot be separated from broader reflections on the end of the world and the emergence of a new order. Questions of eschatology – what happens at the end of the world, or at the end of human life – have long been present in Nosek’s work. One of his older paintings, depicting a stone and a stick, hangs right at the entrance to his studio, and it took me several visits to realize how emblematic this is for him.
In this, Nosek is hardly alone. His works reflect the threats facing contemporary society, which infiltrate all areas of our lives, frequently becoming themes in contemporary art and topics of public discourse: fear of imminent war, the possible end of human life on Earth due to climate change, uncertainty about new social orders.
When you close your eyes, it does not mean you stop seeing
The very title Afterimage signals finality: it refers to images perceived even after everything has disappeared, thanks to the “memory of the eye.” Despite the gravity of the subjects woven into Nosek’s works, the exhibition does not feel oppressive. The colored drawings do not depict threat explicitly, though unease remains. It is present only in hints: instead of falling meteors, rational geometric shapes appear in the landscapes. As if the artist had mastered his anxieties and learned to confront them – building resistance, and so too his art. This, I believe, is the greatest strength of Nosek’s work: it does not ignore heavy themes, but finds ways to move beyond them. Through color, through drawing, through impeccable framing.
