The lines from a notoriously famous song naturally trigger ambivalent feelings, automatically shifting us into the context of a broken or dream-like reality, experienced mindfucks, true hallucinations, and the absurdity that comes from lived reality. Contrary to the lyrics by British band Tears for Fears, turning our attention to the misery resulting from the bleakness of daily routines, this exhibition draws inspiration from a spectrum of absurd and ungraspable feelings emerging from a formally and ideologically twisted reality.
Surrealistically structured spatial scenery represents a selection of works of Slovak and Czech artists that work with simple but expressive artistic gestures, applied to everyday life forms and objects like architectural elements: trivial components of interiors, readymade objects or live creatures. What we are looking at is, however, not what we are looking at. A quick glance at the selected artworks merely accelerates the imperfection of our senses that underlines the insufficient assessment of the given pieces of information and the links among them. Just imagine you were to read the title and the lead sentence, without paying attention to the whole article.
The curator’s project is an intimate visual essay working with a styled reality inspired by real life. The very nature and depicting capacity of the individual works reject all generally valid convictions, creating a vague line between reality and its faint semblance. Subtle detours and shortcuts open themes of everyday existence, (hyper)realism, symbolism, faith, personal mystification, or playfulness in contemporary art, with an inherent accentuation of the fragility of today’s society.
