Fero Lipták warns us from the very beginning that this concerns the word game, Meno, mesto, zviera, vec... (Name, City, Animal, Thing...) in which one player begins to recite the alphabet until another player says, “Stop!” Like every game, it has specific rules, but rules that are meant to be broken, and it seems that the artist really enjoys breaking them. His choice of paintings, drawings, and illustrations is a good example. His red man, so characteristic of his artistic style, barely makes an appearance here. Lipták escapes the predictability of the name to the motifs of the city. But his cities do not submit to the rules either. They are somehow excessive. As if they have gone mad in a compulsive movement of growth. More blocks, more floors, more tracts! This architecture of excess does not bypass even a figure. It transforms it into one of its urban zones, because the principle from which it grows is deeply human. Is it possible to break free from this city’s dictates?
Lipták tries to do so in his imagination, in the world of fantasy animals and things. Where stumps float in the air and hares take baths, perhaps we can be truly free. However, our enchantment is soon broken by the realization that the form of these surreal images is familiar to us after all. It willingly rotates around the gravitational center of the name. The game demands obedience. Unless...
The artist invents himself again to wink at us conspiratorially and remind us that the charm of the game lies primarily in its imperfection. The three dots here open up a space that we barely remember. A pre-normative space, when we were more of a quality than a name. The tiny shapes of buildings, animals, and things in his naive drawings are just clawing their way out of non-existence. As if someone was just learning how to handle a pencil. As if we were rediscovering the world. A... Stop! (ψ)!
František Lipták was born in 1962. He graduated from the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Košice before studying stage design under Prof. Ladislav Vychodil at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. Since 1986, he has worked in almost every theater in Slovakia, as well as various theaters in the Czech Republic and Poland. He is a co-founder of the Teatro Tatro theater company. Over the past 40 years, he has created stage designs for more than 120 productions, many of which have won awards at domestic and foreign festivals. Since 1991, he has also been involved as a production designer in important Slovak films of the 1990s, receiving 4 Czech Film and Television Academy nominations, including 2 Czech Lion awards. In addition, the Association of Slovak Film Clubs presented him withan award for his contribution to Slovak cinematography. His artistic work includes painting, graphics, illustrations, and poster designs. To date, he has had over 40 solo and many group exhibitions at home and abroad.
