Heartbeats. Ježek

The exhibition showcases 138 of the countless hearts that Ježek has drawn for agony aunt Natalia Aspesi's "Questioni di Cuore" ("Matters of the Heart") column devoted to Love and the Soul (Eros and Psyche!) in La Repubblica's "Venerdì" supplement. The heart, the visual metaphor of love, is always the same human muscle, yet on each occasion it is shown in a different light.
The original idea for the exhibition was prompted by Raymond Queneau's Exercices de Style in which the writer describes a single, run-of-the-mill event on a Paris bus in ninety-nine different ways, in ninety-nine different styles and from ninety-nine different viewpoints. In this exhibition the heart, the most obvious symbol of love, is "prepared" in one of the endless (but possibly always identical) variations of the human heartbeat.
Of course the variations are not really endless but Ježek, rising to the challenge (to his creativity), plans to continue painting them and to periodically publish a selection of the best of them. He should be given a place in the Guiness Book of Records as the most prolific painter of hearts in the history of mankind.

Mojmir Umberto Ježek was born in Rome to a Czechoslovak father and a Roman mother.
He studied architecture, had a child and joined the "Fantastici 4" graphic design studio. For the next ten years he beat his head against a brick wall in the search for an impossible revolution. Bandaging his head, he began to work, becoming a cartoonist, doing graphic art work, drawing the "Madame Inquieta" strip cartoon for Linus, painting, sculpting in hard and soft materials (beaten copper, polystyrene and foam rubber) and making videos (Apollo & Daphne reloaded). He sailed to more or less every corner of the Mediterranean until it turned into a cemetery. He started working with agony aunt Natalia Aspesi on the "Questioni di Cuore" ("Matters of the Heart") column in La Repubblica's "Venerdì" supplement decades ago. And he is still at the coalface...

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