Marek Kvetan
*1976 (Slovakia)
education: Technical University in Brno, Department of Art Education, Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava
lives and works in Bratislava
Marek Kvetan belongs to a distinctive generation of artists entering the art scene around 2000. While still studying in the studios of Juraj Bartusz and Daniel Fischer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava, he began to work with new media, digital image post-production and video. His interest in new technologies is still essential to his work today – sound, light and digital transformations often become part of sculptural installations or exhibition environments. Established systems and their disruption, the transformation of their purpose or their deliberate visual and functional manipulation serve as a method for Kvetan to comment on contemporary culture, society and their visual symbols.
Fuscum Subnigrum (2021)
The French philosopher G. Deleuze speaks in his book “Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque” about communication “between the folds of matter and the folds of the soul.” Originally separate planes (body and soul, figurativeness and abstractions) are unified by folds, denying clear distinctions between the external and internal. This corresponds to the complication with which Marek Kvetan’s object, Fuscum subnigrum, works. It paraphrases so-called plague columns and is sculpted from organically generated matter into the form of a conical column – a cone. The architectural base of the cone is acknowledged, but the figures of saints and their attributes are omitted. The internal form is a digital offset of the external one. It is generated by a polygonal structure mathematically analyzing and interpreting the external (visible – known) form into a new undulating emptiness. The layered nature of the work is complemented by a sound layer created directly for the object by the object. This creates another dematerialized plane of its perception.
The symbolic reference to the “plague column” material is supplemented in this pandemic and post-pandemic era by a digital plane – the construct of an inorganic virtual world. The feature of the Baroque in the work is the fold continuing to infinity. And the Baroque primarily distinguishes folds according to two directions, according to two types of infinity, as if infinity had two layers: folds of matter and folds in the soul.