1st place
Bátorek Ján
Settlement Boy
2022, oil, acrylic and spray on canvas, 170 x 130 cm
(* 1989, Čadca)
2009 – 2015, studied at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica, in the studio of Doc. Štefan Balázs. Lives and works in Prague.
Ján Bátorek, three times finalist in the competition, admits to being a child of the 1990s, and this unambiguously influences both the form and the content of his visual language. This artist grew up in a small town in the Kysuce region, where he was formed by a mix of western and eastern aesthetics, so characteristic of the wild concluding years of the past millennium. Precisely this transitional period, and furthermore lived in an exceptionally conservative milieu, meant that Bátorek as a small boy was confronted by two entirely different visual systems. Following Matelko on television along with Spiderman, attaching Terminator stickers to an old Czechoslovak fridge. With the passage of time he began to notice the socialist housing estates streaked with graffiti; he was discovering subcultures that formed him, such as metal and punk, afterwards porno, fetish… Bátorek acknowledges being inspired by expressionism, surrealism, Lynch, postmodernism, poetry, the surroundings and the unconscious… He is fascinated not only by the apocalypse, but also the feeling of fear and immortality – inner marches, the psyche, demons… Formally his preferentially figural painting is defined by a combination of expressive tendencies, an inclination towards symbolism, and indubitably also the visuality of the Czech "black school".
His final entry Settlement Boy (2022) unerringly visualises the setting where many of us grew up. His childhood memories carry a mix of picture book heroes, fragments of larger architectural whole, and the tiles from his Mum’s kitchen. Naively he alludes to the longing to be accepted, which is acted out mainly via external signs: clothing, accessories, tattoos, whereby we express our affiliation to a certain group or clan with which we want to identify. Bátorek tries to capture fragments of urban subcultures and the atmosphere that radiates from them – the disturbing mood, peculiar wit, and hyperbole.
"Negative tribal tattoos, grey housing estates, pubs, bruised knuckles, aching hearts, drugs, and all those chilling and all those memories that are chilling and at the same time so warm – I place them in bizarre surreal scenes. The settlement children walk through the settlement with the countenances of fabulous beings and mutants from western cartoons. Sometimes alone, at other times in groups, they do not go home, they forge schemes, they lounge about, they gulp down freedom…" (J. B.)
(The text is from the catalogue for the competition Painting 2022, N. Gažovičová)
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