Marta Matus’s Collageville
There is a world.
The people who live there are „put together“ from pieces of other people. Really. And they live in houses „sewn together“ from pieces of other houses. The flowers there grow nowhere else, because they are „combined“ from different species.
As if someone in that world first collected something, threw it in a pile, then tore it up, and cut it up, simply destroyed it, and on top of that mixed it all up... in order to then heal, unite and support it.
Marta Matus.
She does that.
Just look at her books.
Collages are the key principle for her (so far). She usually works with them „the old fashioned way“ by using various existing materials. She also employs modern digital methods when she has to first invent material before breaking it down and putting it back together.
It is worth standing by them and seeing “how it’s done.” It is a calm and kind mastery but also hard work. We look and literally see how she glued it together, mixed it, assembled it... and not only that. To make us feel like we are in the stories, to blur the line between the “real” and the “imaginary”, she manipulates scales and perspective, tilts it, and even swirls it. And it is not just the composition of various elements, she works with their height, mass, and layers until the space is filled to bursting, and everything is said.
It is interesting – after all, collage as a technique has disappeared from books for a long time, perhaps even for a whole generation. Its pioneers from the sixties, such as Irena Tarasová, Viera Bombová, and Jarmila Čihánková, have almost been forgotten. Marta Matus has breathed new life into collage and given it its identity.
It‘s our world. Look closely. You can. It’s there, you can almost touch it.
Text: Ida Želinská
Marta Matus (1995) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studios of Dušan Kállay and Ľuboslav Paľo and at the Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule in Halle. She mainly illustrates books for very young children, such as Monika Valentová‘s Pá Pá (Bye Bye), about such important things as waving hello or goodbye, the sensitive story entitled Grip. Had, ktorý chcel mať nohy (Grip. The Snake Who Wanted to Have Legs) by Tomáš Murgaš, and the detective story about a “patchwork” family TO SME MY (THIS IS US) by Jana H. Hoffstädterová. Her work also accompanied Peter Gärtner’s humorous texts Krpci z tretieho vchodu (The Little Guys from the Third Entrance) and Čakanie na sneh (Waiting for Snow), as well as Zuzana Csontosová’s Marcipán má veľký plán (Marzipan Has a Big Plan) about a golden retriever who wanted to help, and Iva Peroutková’s coming of age novel Isabela a bílé mraky (Isabela and the White Clouds). She has exhibited many times at the Municipal Library of Piešťany, as well as the Petržalka Municipal Library, but also at the exhibitions for the BIB - Biennial of Illustrations Bratislava. Etiketa. Pravidlá slušného správania (Etiquette. Rules of Good Behavior) was included among the 100 most beautiful books in the world at the 2022 Bologna Children’s Book Fair.
