Matouš Fiala↓

About the work

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

When I imagine an intersection, I stand in its center. I’m torn to pieces, as if streams of metal snakes in the form of cars have collided right inside of me. Being aware of the context of the world and of ourselves in it may be self-destructive, but it brings a perspective that may help us survive even at this self-absorbing crossroad, in this “black hole,” although not without pain.

From one side of the crossroad, there blows the seductive scent of success. Intellect and ethics blow from the other side, apathy and escapism from the third side, and passion and emotion from the fourth side.

My entire life context comes together in my work. We can view it as a synthesis of countless experiences that confirm but also refute each other. As if I suffered from bipolar disorder. I can feel the ambivalence of the characters that have evolved steadily in me. Is this just my problem, or is the world so contradictory, confused, or even meaningless? I will contradict myself to fulfill my life ideas, otherwise I’d have to cut myself to pieces and let each piece of me follow its own path. This would forestall mutual conflicts.

I base my work on this initially unstable duality. At first, the quarrel within my inner self seemed dysfunctional, as if balancing on the scales. I’ve long struggled with my inability to find my primary path, but yielding to this “dysfunction” eventually opened up a remarkable and colorful world in me, and I keep drawing from it. This personal dialectic refers to the existential issues in the current context of the time. My subject is multi-layered, and as it draws nearer to a specific topic, the fractal principle multiplies it to many others. It is therefore important to examine my work as a constantly changing mind map.

The rational egoism of success clashes with the love of art and its need for autonomy. I am beginning to perceive “success” – that is, success that is associated with the market mentality of capitalism – as immoral conformism in relation to the phenomenon of art. It may at first look as a result of insufficient effort, but it merely is a process of adaptation at the detriment of an individual. This sense of lack of freedom helps me run away from masculine rationality to peripheral feminine fragility, which sometimes transforms into apathy for life or decadent hedonism. The frustration caused by the being unable to act and change forcefully steers me towards transgressive ironic outbursts (the Mercedes subject). They serve me to respond to the cyclical petrified structures of today’s thinking that go hand in hand with xenophobia and fear of everything other and new. The conscious pretense of luxury equals the acceptance of a better future or an escapist approach, when an actor (artist) reacts to the transformation of social values by accepting them as his own and presenting them in a magnified, even exaggerated form. Observing the symptoms of today’s society makes me drop into sadness and imagining a dystopian future. I comment on the latter through my work which, too, is a therapy and separation.