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Mexiko
Ján Hrčka
9. 3. − 1. 5. 2024
Kurátor: Andrej Jaroš
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The second exhibition in the Flatgallery in the calendar year 2024 is dedicated to an already established author of the young generation, a graduate of the painting department of the VŠVU in Bratislava, and at the same time to the musician Ján Hrčka.
The exhibition project entitled MEXICO focuses on the author's current artistic work, continuing his raw pasty painting with limited colours and at the same time underlining the dark "rocker" theme. The artworks under the curatorial selection of Andrej Jaroš convey to the recipients the author's close environment in the Trnávka district of Bratislava, where he spent all his free time as a young teenager.
AUTHORS WORD
With the latest series of paintings, I return to my birthplace, the suburbs of Bratislava, Trnávka. Already in the past, during my other painting cycles, there have been paintings with reference to this district/village in the city (paintings such as "On the way home from a party", where Masaryk's colony with interestingly shaped mansard roofs is depicted.
It is a truss construction in the manner of the so-called of donkey's back, which is characteristic of the colony, as well as the bending of the gable wall of the house, which is a variety of Czech Cubism, then the painting My Neighbor, or "Tavern on Trnávka", the recently demolished Chibik restaurant). But this time I focused primarily on the beginnings of this suburb, which began to be built at the beginning of the last century as a settlement in the vicinity of Hackler's brickyard and the bell tower with the chapel. The first inhabitants were mostly poor "Pressburgers", who built their poor dwellings here, shacks from material taken from the city's demolition sites.
At that time, it was mostly built from waste wood, each board was different, a piece of sheet metal was nailed here and there, and the standard was a brick chimney. They were temporary dwellings without markings, urban anarchy. Together with other suburbs of Bratislava, Jaroslav Funke documented the settlement in his socio-critical photographic cycle "Bad housing". This is how the Dornkappel colony, later the Trnávka periphery of Bratislava nicknamed Mexico, slowly began to form.
The model, or rather the spirit, for my series of paintings, were contemporary amateur photographs of journalist Ilia Jozef Marko, published in the book Dornkappel: suburb of Three Languages.
CURATORIAL TEXT
At the exhibition "Mexico", you can find Ján Hrčka's artworks from his latest time on display, in which he thematically returns to his roots in Trnávka, the Bratislava suburb where he grew up and to which he still has a warm relationship.
The author captures various corners of Trnávka in a documentary way, using his typical pasty and expressive handwriting. It is not by chance that this predominantly First Republic city quarter is popularly nicknamed "Mexico", as a wild part of Bratislava. In the works from this series, you can feel nostalgia and memories from a long time ago, when as a curious teenager he eagerly explored every nook and cranny of his district with his group.
The monochromatic position of the works passes through accents of fresh green and sharp white to an ecstatic explosion of colours in a purely expressive form. The base material, coarse jute, creates with its grid a kind of digital pixelated network on which islands of acrylic deposits are attached. The rawness of the relatively inhospitable industrial marginal character of the city is aptly captured in paintings and quick gestural strokes of a brush or spatula.
In the case of large-format paintings, distance is also necessary. Just squint your eyes and you will find yourself in the middle of flights on the island of Golden Sands.
