Countries in Movement
A selection from Michal Fízik’s latest work, in which the author returns to his initial interest in the country that has always fascinated him
He creates imaginative tuned landscapes, scenes or situations that open the viewer’s personal imagination. The very title of the exhibition Countries in Movement may refer to an industrial country where there is no longer a place that would not be affected by human influence.
However, it also allows you to transfer to the “behind the scenes” of the image, to places that can be easily overlooked in everyday rush. The exhibition is a kind of invitation for the viewer to travel through the mental landscape, finding its preface around the corner of the building, from the side that we have never seen, comes from a screenshot of a running video on YouTube or from the memory of the ghost of a place that the author visited when he was a little boy.
In his typical shades of purple, gray or black color Fízik depicts relatively ordinary to banal themes, but thanks to its representation in the result, they look mysterious, sublime to monumental. In his painting works he follows the tradition of mimetic painting, but in individual works he oscillates between reality and abstraction, which creates the resulting dreamlike, sometimes mysterious expression of his paintings.
At the exhibition, the spaces with which the author works are represented are public places, details of urban corners, architecture, but also selected fragments of countries. These mediate not only through the medium of painting, but also in the form of photographs, sketches, photomontages or objects.
The experiment itself is an important part of the author’s work, it often interferes with his paintings by drawing, spraying or disturbing the surface of the painting by destroying or carving it, thus deconstructing the classic landscape painting.
An important aspect of Fízik’s work is the way of installing his resulting works. Like the modernists, it defines itself against the imaginary boundary of the image with the frame and expands into space. It is often possible to encounter free flaming and extending ends of canvases in his paintings, without firm support. At other times, by disturbing the surface, painting becomes an object. Despite the fact that at first glance his work may act literally, the opposite is true, because the real abstraction takes place both in the paintings and in the exhibition space between them.
