Pope, Circa 2021

Roman Durcek  

Roman Ďurček (*1990, Zlaté Moravce, Slovakia) lives and works in Malé Vozokany, Slovakia. He graduated from the Fine Arts program, which he completed in the painting studios at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. He successfully completed his doctoral studies in 2022 (supervisors: Prof. Ľudovít Hološka and Assoc. Prof. Ján Triaška). He subjects painting to various experimental practices concerning materials, pigments, and substrates. The process has become a significant phenomenon for the artist. Since 2014, he has regularly participated in both solo and group exhibitions in Slovakia and abroad. In 2018, he received the Martin Benka Award, was a three-time finalist in the VÚB Painting of the Year competition (2017, 2019, 2021), and a two-time finalist in the NOVUM Foundation Award (7th and 8th editions).

Paradoxes

The artist primarily focuses on the medium of painting while also exploring its boundaries, characterized by discursive contributions and material research. His aim is to connect painting with and subject it to various experimental practices concerning material diversity, pigments, and substrates. He experiments with combinations of traditional and non-traditional pigments, methods of biochemical oxidation processes, ensuring a unique effect for themes that are both current and connected with the artist's internal experiences. From the perspective of social-critical reflection, he addresses the contemporary value-depleting and skewed times, emphasizing individual performances and the preference for pseudo-models. From this perspective, figurative creation and work with archetypes of cultural memory dominate. He perceives emblematic figurative compositions and icons of classical art as models of values and their contemporary misinterpretations. His goal is to explore existence as such and the existential situations of contemporary individuals through an internal authorial statement in the form of painting, which is under pressure from demands on performance, career, life success, and thinking. In continuity with his previous work, he will build and develop the chosen theme based on experience and experimentally examines situations from the perspective of formal possibilities. The project's contribution is to provide an internal statement of the author to the viewer through visual art, specifically twenty-two paintings of various dimensions. The exhibition was preceded by a selection of paintings in consultation with the curator, resulting in a final count of fifteen works.

His work underwent thorough theoretical and narrative analysis of social events worldwide, and based on this, the artist aimed to provide a statement or message to future generations through the expressive means of the techniques mentioned.