Your art delves deep and creates another dimension, the materialisation of a state between the real and the subconscious. Has this attitude and way of seeing things always existed? Were there different phases before you found your stylistic identity?
I believe that the sense develops with time, growth, and experience. As you rightly say in my practice, thinking and seeing are superior to mastering a tool of capturing. This way is formed in us, and develops much earlier than when encountering photography or another medium of expression. I first held a camera at around 18 years old after eye correction surgery, but being a curious and inventive child I have spent all my young years fantasising and imagining so at that point, many images were already made in my mind. I used to spend hours observing a single object, or hundreds of windows, seen from our tiny flat inside of a huge housing block growing up in suburbs in Slovakia. Instead of capturing I was inventing the entire narratives, complex stories of what I could not see through lit rectangles so similar to the screen of a photograph. Saying a story through fragments and gestures, with a fascination for what is hidden, beyond or in-between which translates into my work and way of perceiving. There have been many other stages as I gradually changed and refused to stick with “something that works”. The transitions are subtle but constant, often noticed only with the distance of time, retrospectively. All of that is my stylistic identity, it is my life, influences, and everything that happens in it. I’m strongly connected to my practice and I suppose it will never be another way.
Everyone has distinctive traits, details, and elements with which they recognise a connection, an innate empathy. What are these for you, both stylistically and aesthetically? Are there things you feel particularly drawn to or that, over time, have become constants in your life?
Professionally speaking I’m largely inspired by film and theatre. Often I hear that my works remind me of a movie scene or a stage. It is intrinsically what I do, building a world in which the story unfolds. The minimal, washed out, or reduced aesthetics I’m recognised for, serve to leave a spotlight on what is important, a key element for understanding. The rest is left to be told by the absence of information, space free for the reflection of the viewer. Everyone has their way of connecting the pieces but every object, gesture, or use of significant color is deliberate and meaningful. I’m also creatively drawn to architecture which appears almost in all the projects either as background or even protagonist. Whether it is the use of building style to define a political regime or societal programming, nostalgia, gentrification, or a sense of identity I’m very interested in how much can be understood by the spaces we build, destroy, and what surrounds us. But most of all I’m interested in human stories. Often through a slightly personal layer, I try to reflect on much larger issues that connect us all. There might be individuals, the representatives of certain groups, or scenes acting as examples but often they only point the way to very complex topics, which my works react to but do not manage to grasp.
