Have you read those encyclopedias? About coffee, chocolate, sushi or tea? In them, Dávid Soboň illustrates what he enjoys and tells us about it.
He has so much to say!
He has a trick for this: he writes a short text and expands on what didn't fit into words in a picture next to it. He effortlessly weaves ten different thoughts into one thread. And then we are looking at it... and we can't put it down. No 27 seconds of attention (that's the average time we spend in front of a painting in a gallery, and it's similar for books), we calmly stay on the page for a minute. "Wait! what’s this?", we think. Or, "Ah! I didn't even notice this the first time!" When twenty-seven people (really, I counted them and they are here, on the wall) are running somewhere for coffee, we realize how ingeniously conceived and funny it is. Each character is carefully stylized. One is happy, another is angry, the third is scared of something... and yet they are interconnected, everything is connected to everything in subtle gestures. We look at it and want to read on, to know how these micro-stories will end. We enjoy the visual gags and the carnival-like atmosphere in the intense, saturated color scale.
It is not a fixed range of colors, or a decoration of the content for him: colors function as a "system", which helps him to organize his stories, determine their pace and clarify the connections.
In addition to his book about coffee, the exhibition features picture books in progress: stories that are still maturing, taking shape. It took courage to pull out what, when printed "on paper" might look completely different in a few months!
He doesn't change his philosophy in them either. He still maps out the little kindnesses of everyday life that make life warm, welcoming, and caring.
Dávid Soboň (1990)
studied at the Jozef Vydra School of Applied Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design. He illustrates. Extensively. He wrote and illustrated the following four cheerful culinary encyclopedias and illustrated histories of food for the Monokel publishing house: Káva – dúšok po dúšku (Coffee - Sip by Sip, 2022), Čokoláda – tablička po tabličke (Chocolate – Bar by Bar, 2023), Sushi – rolka za rolkou (Sushi - Roll by Roll, 2024) and Čaj – šálka za šálkou (Tea - Cup by Cup, 2025). Before that, he did the illustrations for Sandman and other stories (2026) by Ernst T. A. Hoffmann. He illustrated Kolofón a lovec plastov Zero Waste (Kolofón and the Zero Waste Plastic Hunter, 2022), one of Peter Gärtner’s stories about his wooden marionette. And this year, the Albatros media publishing house released the large animal atlas Animaps based on the idea of Ján Chalupník and Tom Velčovský. In addition to book illustration – his work can be found in the children’s magazine Slniečko and in graphic design for Čierne diery (Black Holes) and in the world of computer games, on which he collaborates with the Pixel Federation studio. In 2026, his book about tea was selected from more than 4,700 submitted works as one of the 200 best on the World Illustrations Awards platform.
