Radek Směták↓

About the work

Personal Aesthetics

This will be a deep self-reflection.

My aim is to connect different influences through a personally conceived form. My work and my visual testimony are much more about me than about mediating the topic to viewers. Although my job may seem appealing, this definitely is not its aim. The aim is to influence things around me into what is personally close and pleasant to me. I have always tried to create a kind of universe around my personality that was changing with the development of my personal style and taste.

My works are influenced by absorbing a large number of stimuli that represent the extended world around them. From fragile natural motifs, products of nature, fashion, music, and videos to purely emotional creations and elements of existentialism and Japonisme. I thus create rich inspirational units that are crucial for establishing relationships and forming ideas for my world. They sensitively fuse into an aesthetic and emotional whole parts of which I gradually share with my surroundings, or into elements that are currently related to my art.

Contrast also plays a significant role in this curatorial intention – contrast that is both visual and personal. Because I am not afraid to move confidently in areas mostly targeted at the female part of society. This allows me to develop my own feminine side, which is increasingly reflected in my work. However, it is not a matter of disunity or overshadowing masculinity, but of reconciling the two aspects of man. I love how these two archetypes come together in me and allow me to go beyond visual and thematic limits. Thanks to this, I can completely immerse myself in the emotional unlimited depth of expression.

Recently, I have been focusing more and more on creating an atmosphere around my works, in order to gradually build the universe of my influence and increase the chances at experiencing and deeper affecting viewers. The installation of my diploma is my first big attempt to achieve this effect. Not by far the last attempt to affect viewers with the entire exhibition space.

My diploma focuses on ideas and creative needs of a personality, on expressing personal preferences. I am trying to create an intimate sacred place from objects that are a kind of private shrines, my own therapeutic space built for one person for the purpose of imaginary personal meditation. The result is the tendency to subordinate the function of a space to man, to completely subordinate it to humanity. This draws the space nearer to man.

The crucial aspect of my diploma is how the relationship between space and the mental state in which we live works. Respectively, what our needs to adjust the space according to our aesthetics are, what ideas we focus on, what ideas inspire us, what idea we have about a space, what we transform it into and try to compare it, how far we are able to shift the perception of space and above all, in which creative way we are able to transform this space. I was inspired by the situation with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, when we had to spend time at home and preferably at a distance from our loved ones. This left us locked in our rooms. One possible solution was to adjust this space and find ways to stay far away from the unfriendly reality, the pessimistic, toxic social networks, and to find something “more positive”.