Svetlana Fialová: Small Triggers

Svetlana Fialová graduated from the Faculty of Arts of the Technical University in Košice (the Studio of Graphics and Experimental Artwork led by prof. Rudolf Sikora), from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (the Studio of Painting led by doc. Vladimír Skrepl) and the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (the Studio +iXXI led by prof. Daniel Fischer, Ph.D. studies). She is the only Czech and Slovak artist to receive the prestigious Jerwood Drawing Prize (2013) in Great Britain. She has created her own specific drawing style that focuses on a clear outline line. She often works with a figure that she places in a chaotic composition and environment. The figure is thus lost in the real world full of Internet entertainment, procrastination and an accelerated lifestyle. She likes to experiment and went through different periods where she expressed herself through graphics, painting and installation.

In the Altán Klamovka Gallery she exhibited a new project that is called Malé spúšte (Small Triggers) and portrays flashes from the past that often seems dead to us yet it still affects our present. This unease, the personal experience of the author, who for some time lived nearby the Altán Klamovka Gallery, and the analysis of newly acquired family relationships have become inspirational sources for her exhibited cycle. Svetlana Fialová’s artwork also reflects her recent experience from residing in Japan where she was fascinated by the issues of truthfulness, personal autonomy and the position of women in society. The artist hid specific metaphors of pop-culture in her cycle of drawings where she deliberately cites fragments from old master painters’ artwork and combines them with current elements of visual communication. She skillfully translates, through sketches, this combination of styles into a winding drawing that has no beginning and no end. She develops her typical drawing with a clear and distinct line against comics drawings in figurative motifs, referring to the Internet sub-culture and a special mythology in two-dimensional drawings where she likes to work with a distorted perspective. The freezing of a moment and its translation into drawing is important for Svetlana Fialová because she considers drawing a medium that makes it possible to quickly record an idea and to express it in the most direct way.