“How about you? Can you awaken and break free of the shell that is your puppet’s body? Hee- heeheehee!”
King of Riddles, Arlecchino (from action RPG video game Lies of P)

In lone and silent hours / When night makes a weird sound of its own stillness / Like an inspired and desperate alchemist / Staking his very life on some dark hope
Percy Bysshe Shelley – Alastor: Or, the Spirit of Solitude

Does it ever happen to you that in the dark you go off the path and suddenly your mind fills with a racing pulse for no apparent reason? It may be that you are seized by a gripping feeling of uncertainty or a strange fluttering in your stomach, like that of a puppet with a beating heart or a boy with a dead look. The exhibition project Heartbeaten by Berlin-based artists Ryo Koike and David Pinkava tells the story of losing one’s anchorage in the recognisable contours of the ‘real’ world, sleepwalking through space with dissolved meanings and the ghosts that accompany us.

In his paintings, Ryo Koike is not afraid to depict situations and objects with their finest details, which, surprisingly, obscure more than reveal. The self-absorbed protagonists cover their boyish bodies and faces in heavy fabrics and suffocating blankets. The interior spaces shatter with mirrored reflections, jagged furniture and horrific hurtful props. Koike builds mysterious symbolic worlds, in which he constantly plays with the ambiguity of the depicted – a sinister gothic gargoyle can be a tear duct, devilish horns lurk under Little Red Riding Hood’s cape, a delicate tea ritual is decorated with eyeballs that are lying around. This play with fairy tale motifs and symbolic associations brings a liberating awakening of troubled mental states – those of the childish, the enchanted or the demonic. In a similar way, human bodies can take on the function of mechanical shells – an animated machine or a puppet, but at the same time ordinary objects can take on a life story of their own. With every brushstroke, Koike seems to be building a magical world that is mercilessly subject to his own emotions.

The visions in David Pinkova’s drawings, like Ryo Koike’s, are based on somnabulous world-building and absorption of spaces around an imaginary main protagonist. Mental travel is embodied in his precise, yet expressive, drawings in the figure of a night walker or a glossator detached from society. Hypnagogically blurred perception filters the flow of information that threatens to overload the senses. However, the psychedelic ink nocturne absorbs returning signs and mirages. And it does so with the lust and gluttony of a consciousness stricken with sleep paralysis.

The exhibition intervention by Jakub Hájek and František Hanousek underlines the worldbuilding of Ryo Koike and David Pinkava both by the supporting structure in the form of a shell-like dwelling and mainly by the colour interventions, which dose the viewer’s attention drop by drop and embed themselves in the consciousness with creeping ornaments. The colour dripping and spilling over the gallery walls recalls the ink-blackened paper or the blissful melancholy of a glossy oil painting. The exhibition space is altered in a similar way as the lines and surfaces gradually highlight a street scenery on a scratched wall. One can easily recognize here a human silhouette under the cover of darkness or suddenly feel a loss of control over one’s imagination as in a “high” state of mind, when one, like a puppet, doubts one’s ability to control one’s body and actions.