Michal Škoda’s exhibition Continuous Touches at GASK forms a conceptually arranged whole at the centre of which are the sketch-diaries that form the basis for his drawings. Škoda engages in a dialogue with space both within his works and through his works’ relationship to the setting in which they are exhibited. He continually records places, events, and moment through his well-honed sensitivity.

This exhibition of Škoda’s Records shows the diary entries from the years2018–2019 in which he explores his everyday experiences. Although the various fragments, many of which are of personal significance, reveal an inner intimacy, the aim of the exhibition is not to decode them in this sense. The diary nature of these views/fragments contains traces of the immediate moment but also reveals a conceptual process involving a broad range of possible intepretations. Škoda works with a broad range of techniques, including photography, drawings and sketches, monotypes, and random prints. His sketched records show a way of thinking that does not aim for a definitive form. Škoda’s Records present their creator in his long-term concentrated captivation. Similarly diary-like visual records of everyday life can be found in the artist’s books that Michal Škoda has been making since 1996.

By comparison, the drawings (the exhibited drawings were created during his residency in Vienna in 2018) that Škoda has been creating at the same time show an attempt at a clearly structured form. These works reflect his long-term interest in architecture, in particular its humanist dimension. Škoda sees his drawings as an essential depiction of the heart of the matter. While his diaries are records in time, due to its topicality and fleeting nature the aspect of time is not as present in his drawings. The creative process becomes a form of meditation. Means of expression are minimalized. Form is transferred onto two dimensions and avoids perspective. The third dimension of space is merely felt, opening only to a certain point of view. Structure as such reveals the presence of man. What is important is what cannot be seen. The drawings’ range of noncolors from white to black corresponds with the black-and-white of the photographs from the diaries; they are like shadows of reality.

Škoda’s most intensive dialogue with the (exhibition) space takes place in the blackbox, for which he has prepared a site-specific installation consisting of older diary records based primarily on photographs related to the self-contained cycle Time and Environment (2011–2017), where layers of time overlap with the present moment.