The Retrospective Nobody Scheduled

The exhibition opened on a Tuesday, which already tells you something. Tuesdays are for dentist appointments and tax forms. Nobody opens an exhibition on a Tuesday unless the gallery had a scheduling conflict and bumped you, or unless the artist died recently enough that urgency felt required. In this case, both.

Miroslav Štěpánek had been dead for eleven days when his daughter wheeled in the first crates. Jakub was there because a magazine — one of the surviving ones, barely — had asked for a piece on the retrospective. Eight hundred words, they said, with the tone of people asking a favour they know they can't repay. He said yes with the tone of someone who has nowhere better to be on a Tuesday.

He had not known Štěpánek well. A few exchanges at openings, one long conversation about illustration versus fine art that ended without resolution because the tram came. Štěpánek had worked in a particular style that critics described as naïve and meant as an insult, which is one of the more reliable ways to identify critics who have stopped looking carefully at things. The paintings were large. Domestic interiors, mostly. Kitchens with too much going on. Windows with views that didn't quite match the weather outside them. People sitting in chairs that seemed to be holding them rather than the other way around.

The daughter — Jana, mid-forties, wearing the expression of someone managing something they did not volunteer for — was arranging the wall labels when Jakub arrived. She had his handwriting. That is: the labels were handwritten, and he recognised the slope of them as something her father had done, translated now into her. He did not say this to her. It did not seem like the right moment. There are things you notice that you keep.

The paintings went up over four hours. Jakub sat in the corner with a sketchbook and drew the installation process because that is what he does when he doesn't know what else to do, which is most of the time. The gallery assistant arguing quietly with a level. Jana standing back from a large canvas of a kitchen table and going very still. The paintings themselves, face-out against the wall in sequence before hanging, like a line of people waiting to be told something.

By late afternoon the room had become something different from what it had been that morning. This is what galleries do, technically. But there was a specific quality to it Jakub kept circling without being able to draw it properly. The paintings were not arranged chronologically. Jana had done it by — he asked her, eventually, because he couldn't figure it out — by which ones had been hanging in the flat when her father died, and which had been in storage. The flat ones went on the left wall. The stored ones on the right. The logic was not aesthetic. It was something else. A kind of argument about presence.

He stood in the middle of the room for a long time after she explained this. The left wall was messier, more domestic, several of the frames slightly marked. One painting — a window, grey light, a cup — had a small crack in the varnish running from the lower right corner, about four centimetres, then stopping. This crack had been in a room where someone lived and eventually didn't. The right wall was cleaner. The paintings there looked, by comparison, like they had been waiting for permission.

Jakub is not a sentimental person by preference. Sentiment is easy and he is suspicious of easy things in art. But he stood there with his sketchbook closed because opening it felt like the wrong kind of response. Sometimes you are in front of something and the only honest reaction is to not make anything from it yet. To just let it be a room with paintings in it, divided by a logic that would not survive a curatorial review but was more true than anything a curatorial review would produce.

He wrote the eight hundred words. He described the paintings accurately — the interiors, the domestic weight, the chairs — and said something about Štěpánek's refusal to treat the ordinary as a subject requiring elevation. The magazine ran it with a photo of the wrong painting, a storage one, very clean, right wall. He noticed. He let it go. This is also a skill.

What he didn't write about was Jana going still in front of her father's kitchen table, or the four-centimetre crack. These belong to the drawings he made that afternoon, which he has not shown anyone. He doesn't know if they're any good. He knows they're accurate. Sometimes that's enough and sometimes it isn't, and he has stopped pretending he can always tell which situation he's in.

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