FRESH TRASH

Ema Prosová's work doesn't announce itself loudly. Her drawings and paintings on silk operate in a register that's contemplative, layered, almost whispered: figures emerging from lychee fruits, hospital rooms floating in eerie space, architectural fragments mingling with natural forms. The work comes from years spent moving between cultures and techniques, learning lacquer painting in Vietnam, silk painting in Indonesia, living in Tokyo, and now finishing her degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague.

French painter and illustrator Sébastien Pastor navigates between naïve figuration and abstract expressionism, building visual worlds where bold color palettes pulse with rhythm and absurdity. Discover how his colorblindness became a creative signature and how he leaves room for the enigmatic in his works.

In my last year’s review, I wrote that some part of me wished to keep PAF jealously to myself. Either that wish has not been intercepted in the ether or has been twisted completely because the 2025 edition of PAF, Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art in Olomouc, Czechia, was bursting at the seams; again. However, it’s one of the Czech festivals that deserves to be sold out and a bit cramped, and I’ll tell you why.

Czech painter Lukáš Šmejkal traces the unstable boundary between body and terrain, composing lyrical visual assemblages where electric pylons become threads and human figures dissolve into the landscapes they inhabit. Discover how photography, movement, and Baroque verticality shape his meditations on perception in today's interview.