Exhibitions

THAT'S WHAT I CALL A CONCEPT 
DOX Centre for Contemporary Art Prague 2018

 

Viktor Freso: THAT'S WHAT I CALL A CONCEPT DOX Centre for Contemporary Art Prague 2018

Curator Leoš Válka For several generations of conceptual artists, absurd and subversive declarations or verbal interventions in galleries as well as public spaces became a fundamental tool for penetrating deep into the viewer’s consciousness and eliciting impressions quite different than just aesthetic ones: outrage, shock, anger, or criticism. On the cusp of a new millennium, Slovak artist Viktor Frešo decided, however, to leave this entire huge and sophisticated conceptual art apparatus, intellectual and material, by the wayside. He is not the only one who during recent decades has been irritated by the emptiness, pretence, and speculative nature of conceptual projects, and above all their hopeless isolation from real emotions and possible artistic experience. As a cure for latter-day “art for art’s sake”, the works of Viktor Frešo present a number of forceful solutions that mount an attack on “art operations” (among other things) and allow both artists and viewers to claim their inalienable right to perceive, experience, and think about art in an unrestrained manner. With caustic affection, Frešo makes use of classical genres, which he then torpedoes without any scruples. • In his soul-searching self portrait entitled I’m a Complex-Ridden Prick or the concretist text I Won’t Be the Best and Most Famous Slovak Artist!, he mounts a frontal assault on the socially established and sacrosanct status of artists and other “artsies” who often are nothing but snake oil salesmen but don’t have the guts to admit it. He also takes to task curators, the unassailable demiurges of the art world, in a similar manner when his contribution to an exhibition on the topic of “politics in art” bears the laconic title You Know Twat About Politics. In the purely textual series entitled What Helped Me, When..., in which he describes his own weaknesses and addictions, he intentionally makes use of quite non-artistic means. Through what are basically therapeutic notes, he attempts to once again imbue art with intimacy and the opportunity to engage in a collective experience. During the last decade, Frešo has turned to three-dimensional objects that seemingly take us back to the endlessly recycled tradition of ready-mades and the global canon of minimalist aesthetics. In reality, however, they have been infected by the virus of caustic humour and absurdity: a stepladder is paralyzed by adhesive tape, a carpet leaves the floor to climb away somewhere up the wall, and junked elevator cabins imperatively entitled Stop Eastern European Conceptual Art! roll about freely on casters. A radical installation entitled That’s What I Call a Sculpture – a four-meter beam jutting inappropriately out from the wall into the gallery space – then forces the viewer to literally step over or around entrenched clichés, and to stop and think together with Viktor Frešo about what routes contemporary art can take to find its way out of blind alleys.

Leoš Válka

 

 

TABULA RASA 
Tatranska galeria Poprad

NEO POST NOW 
101 GALLERY PRAGUE

Viktor Freso NOW 
DSC gallery Prague 2017

Viktor Freso NOW

DSC gallery presents the latest collection of works of multimedia artist Viktor Frešo, who belongs to the major figures of the Czech and Slovak art scene (b. 1974 in Bratislava, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2005).

Frešo programatically focuses on one subversive, resolute gesture, a concentrated elementary shape and a fundamental bold statement. He is constantly creating new critical escalated situations which disrupt rules and the spectator’s perception of the world and art. The rebelliously poetic gestures are created by the combination of post-conceptual ideas and a punk approach.

Through the free use of various media, Frešo most recently concentrates on 3D outputs- creating objects and assemblages. With some irony, wit and the necessary distance, the artist creates a series of nonfunctional objects and new combined forms. This is borderline form of sculpture and its acceptability, which blends post-minimalist form with content emptiness and fragments of the "ready made".

On this exhibition Frešo presents a series of his own ‚mongoloid‘ heads in different forms and designs including expressive paintings on glass, a glass ball with neons, epoxy head and a stylized ornamented ‚Mother of God‘.“Pop art is too serious. It’s a done deal. And I feel that I’m a little bit mongoloid, so this is mongoloid pop art,” the artist reflects. The second part of the exhibition in DSC Gallery is a series of vertical nonfunctional objects based on mechanical layering of technological parts, high tech fragments and cables, impaled on a needle (Gyros 2016 – 2017). “These kitchen and cosmic ‚kebab‘ skewers present components of the music world (switches, aluminium mounts, speakers and microphones) and link to the artist‘s personal and family background. Both series are enhanced by various ‚sexy‘ lighting variations, including neon tubes, lightbulbs and LED diodes,”

Through this "conflict" of materials and contexts Frešo generates a hybrid object crisis that still governs elementary gestures, pungent (self) irony and liberating smART games.

Vlado Beskid

Dokoupil - Frešo 
Kunsthalle Kosice 2015

DOKOUPIL – FREŠO

The joint exhibition of two visual artists Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Viktor Frešo in the Kunsthalle – the Hall of Art in Košice (Slovakia) is a unique meeting reasoning the contemporary media of painting and sculpture. 

Jiři Georg Dokoupil (born in 1954) is a significant European artist who has devoted himself to painting medium for quite a time – from neo-expressionism painting to experi-mental positions and means of painting work. Within the space of years he has brought a whole series of innovative techniques of painting which he presents in rounded cycles (painting in tyre, whip, banana, soot, candle smoke, etc.). Within the present-day Košice exhibition he presents a series of paintings with soap bubbles. It is a process of calculated spontaneity and action where the bubbles added with pigment create strange organic and dynamic structures melodically floating over the painting area.  

The Slovak artist Viktor Frešo (born in 1974) presents a series of broad-minded elementary objects which present a hybrid combining of materials and contexts: a combination of rusty iron and glittering aluminium structure, the DIY aesthetics of the Eastern Bloc countries (workshop desk, press screw with a pipe, non-functioning lifts) with a personal author´s background (music, footlights, show business). It is a boundary form of sculpture and its acceptability: post-minimalism form and a content emptiness with ready-made fragments. 

A joint work by both the authors is the only big-board text statement in which they comment on the present-day art market. Thus, a new communication background with an articulated tension and different authors´ approaches is created in the triangle of painting, object, and text. Their shared platform has remained ele-mental gestures, conceptual irony and liked smART games.

Vladimír Beskid

 

 

 

Eastern Connector 2012 
Princ Prager gallery

Viktor Frešo: Eastern Connector, Princ Prager Gallery, Prague

Thanks to his academic activities in Vladimír Skrepl and Michal Bielický´s studios, during a timeof widespread postproduction, Viktor Frešo, a young, Slovak artist known in Prague, represents avaluable exception. Though his highly professional postproduction dominates, his artwork is basedon far broader context of strategies and meanings than the norm. The basic theme of Viktor Frešo´smovement on the art scene is studying his common etymological and narrative qualities, searchingfor its sense, its auracity and sparklingly initial creative substances; only then he is interested in thestrategy of his own production. In this sense Frešo is a romantic artist. With respect to his restlesscharacter and exclusive talent, Frešo perceives his presentations as events sui generis, as gesturesthat have their exquisite aesthetic canon and meaning. However, his presentations are mainlyevents, actions or performances. The firmly arranged exhibition with perfectly polished objectsis also an active and variable event, or rather an incentive to be perceived. At a certain point, theexhibition is a stoppage of creative production. From this point media and “material” scales Frešo´sartwork, where the mental and potential motor activity is visible and logically unfolded. Frešo´swork tell stories or they count on them. We can imagine what has happened before and during theartwork ‘s origin. The events regarding the artwork also develop after their creation and exhibition.Frešo keeps everything in mind; art is part of the life game.

Frešo´s artwork is usually funny, with a punch line, despite their variable potentiality exactlyconstructed. Frešo also confidently works in the sphere of postproduction, though he becamefamous for his objects equipped with various wheels that allowed him to release a playful,nonsensical artistic expression while simultaneously attacking borders of constructive and conceptualwork. As an ideal example, the title work at Prague´s exhibition is Václav Havel´s official presidentialphotograph with a halo. More or less he works and deals with a polysemy. By referring to Havel,Frešo presents a multifaceted, personal reaction on both Havel person, at the time when hewas a Czechoslovak politician, and the social connotations related to him – including artisticembalmment. In this connection, I mention that in Prague´s National theatre, just shortly afterHavel’s death, a rather badly done bronze bust of the well-known playwright and statesman wassituated; surrounded by the greatest Czech personalities. The legend under the photography isalso worth mentioning because it reads “President of the Czechoslovak Socialistic Republic“ and ofcourse Frešo´s striking “signature“. Light provocation is a decoration present in art since the time ofromanticism; it is natural, gentle, necessary and prolific – even in the case of Frešo´s visual activity.

Martin Dostál