Martin Salajka: Neurosis

Description

Martin Salajka graduated in 2008 at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts with prof. Michael Rittstein. He held his first solo exhibition in 2005 at the Youth Gallery in Brno, and since then he has organized more than two dozen solo exhibitions.

The enigmatic world of nature continues to enchant and entice him with its mystery and poetics of melancholy dreams. However, it is also a world that is rational and predictable, that can be grasped and represented by art. Everything is the same and everything is changing. This apparent contradiction is the driver of Salajka’s aesthetic, spurring the artist onwards in his attempt to overcome the unknown and inexplicable by means of the rational. Salajka does not drown in bottomless dreams, but by retaining all elements of the mysterious creates carefully constructed aggregates. However, within this confusion, within networks of chaos, everything retains its mystery and is not, in the final analysis, exiled from reality. Night-time in the countryside, in the middle of a forest, offers an imaginary sanctuary of peace and quiet. In fact, however, there is no suspension of hustle and bustle and noise. On the contrary, a choir begins to roar, the hymn of the life of darkness and shadows. The spirits of the long dead become intertwined with the living in a harmony of horror and enlightenment. Salajka’s most recent paintings have increasingly solid structures and compositions: he works in larger formats and often experiments with their differences. Thematically, on the contrary, new connections and links are released, as though greater technical certainty had opened the portals to a freer imagination. Individual paintings contain dozens of details, minor and marginal stories that, nevertheless, come together to form an almost novel-like structure. They thus require more attention and above all concentration from the viewer, more observation than looking, reason as well as emotion.

graphic designer: Jana Vahalíková (Studio Marvil)

pages: 192