Family Heritage
For over three decades, Viktor Frešo has tirelessly been disrupting the peaceful rhythm of the domestic and international art scene. He is constantly overstepping the bounds of what is permitted/expected, and he keeps testing the limits of his artistic language, continuously updating, bending, and transforming it. Sometimes he is more serious, other times playfully spontaneous; traditionally conceptual, pop-art straightforward, but at the same time ultra-contemporary, technically innovative, and always in tune with the times. His work is ideologically layered, but also immediately banal. It’s “all fun and games” – until suddenly it’s not. Despite all the metamorphoses and borderline positions, he remains faithful to the fundamental pillars of his work: personal mythology, radical honesty, and harsh irony.
Viktor Frešo’s solo exhibition Family Heritage, created for Prague’s Spot Gallery, captures the author at a time when he has developed a keen interest in his personal family history, returning to the rich heritage of the previous generations. He collects and combines fragments of personal archives, brings into play various finds and preserved artifacts and banal visual traces, and mixes them with his own iconography. The result is an imaginary chronicle connecting the past with the present, in which he freely combines private and fictional histories, develops family mythology, and creates new formal and conceptual twists.Frešo’s current work offers several principles and formal strategies that he systematically employs across his projects. In recent years, his expression has stabilized mainly in the field of objects, sculptures, and paintings, drawing heavily on his work with readymade objects. He collects them, reconfigures them, and incorporates them into new situations. The result is various hybrid forms in which he combines the incompatible. He revives historical materials, strips them of their original function, and reactivates them in a new context. At the same time, he changes the established hierarchy – elevating insignificant or banal things to works of art, while originally valuable materials become raw materials, carriers/bases for further gestures. In this manner, he reopens the inexhaustible theme of the division between high and low art, and the objects’ acquisition of an artifactual status.And so we watch a historical 19th century landscape painting by an unknown artist become the backdrop for the flattened iconic “Pičus” /Cunt/, which long ago ceased to be just a provocative symbol and has been transformed into something of a (rather significant) brand. The principle of absurd contrast also applies to the father’s rolled-up sock: a worthless everyday artifact associated with personal memories, which, through digital scanning, printed in a monumental version, and subsequently placed on a magnificent historical pedestal, becomes a most-precious memento.
The theme of portraiture appears repeatedly and in various forms in Frešo’s works. From stylized self-portraits and caricature figures with exaggeratedly enlarged heads to his latest sculptural work, which in the context of the exhibition represents an imaginary family memorial. It combines the most distinctive physical features into a slightly deformed, heavy, and almost biomorphic sculptural mass. The entire form is supported by a robust wooden structure made of 150-year-old rotting wood from the artist's family cottage. Wood, as a symbolic bearer of the past, connects him to his family line, which, in his interpretation, is constantly being rewritten and revived in the form of a family myth.
At his current exhibition, Viktor Frešo also reconfigures his own past as well as his initial creative impulses. Using AI, he transfers a 1990s figurative drawing of his 3-D space and transforms it into a hybrid female figure with a slightly dystopian sci-fi look. The characteristic principles of seriality and reproduction can also be seen in the casts of a relief of his family cottage, which he created when he was twelve years old. With each new version, we observe slight shifts, errors, or material changes. The repetition of the same motif reveals the process, speaking of time, and the memory of the object.
Painting and painterly gestures have always been present in Frešo’s work – whether in the form of inscriptions, spray-painted interventions in the space, or his work with text. For many years, these represented a kind of secondary line that coexisted alongside the author’s objects and sculptures. It is only recently that he has fully embraced this line and systematically brought it to the fore. His gestural and dynamic work with oil paints shows a tendency towards a simplified form of self-portraiture, which he incorporates into abstract and expressively layered impasto compositions. In combination with objects and sculptures, painting thus forms another piece of the complex multimedia ecosystem of an artist reconfiguring his own history.