Poet, prosaist, publicist, translator

“The gallery and the painter are like communicating vessels."

There are not many artists in Slovakia who, devote themselves to organizing art life and exhibition activities, besides creating artworks. Academic painter Andrej Smolák focused all these activities on his own program, the credo, he started to realize when he opened the MIRO Gallery branch in Snina (eastern Slovakia), which was founded and is successfully led by his brother Miro in Berlin and Prague. The connection of a creative artist with gallery’s practice is in some sense like the principle of communicating vessels - both activities interact. The gallerist keeps a track of contemporary art efforts and the artist exits the ivory tower of his studio, has an idea of a particular recipient of his art. Both activities inspire each other, although they collect the necessary tax in the form of sacrificed time, but the results show that this orientation in the case of Andrei Smolák is correct. The best evidence is the lifetime and success of the twelve years of the The Fine Art Festival Snina and the parallel painting, in the last two years also the sculptural open air, which positively brought to the notice of artists from many countries, not only the MIRO Gallery, but also the town of Snina. This is proved by the visit of several state officials and prominent personalities of the art world on the open air.

The artistic development of Andrej Smolák from the studies at the Faculty of Arts of the UPJŠ in Prešov and the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to this day is going on continuously externally, without obvious creative crises, taking place mainly at the level of constant experimentation with art techniques and themes, though the dominant theme, after many years of depicting beauty of the nature in eastern Slovakia, is a woman's beauty in all its forms. Over the past few years, he has presented results of search efforts at several solo and collective exhibitions (also abroad). Successfully, as proved by the media coverage of his exhibitions. Who keeps a close eye on different phases of his creativity, will surely notice, that he seizes the areas of the painting more and more complicatedly and is trying to expresss himself in several levels simultaneously. The painting becomes his materialized idea of the worlds terrestrial and spiritual, of beings real and imagined, of passions and dreams experienced, dreamed and anticipated. Deciphering the message of the paining thus becomes ambiguous and at the same time subjective (in the mind of the percipient). Uncovering the layers reminds the work of an archaeologist. Feeling leads knowledge and transforms it into an artistic experience. Beauty in Smolák's understanding is not an abstract aesthetic category, but a concrete, most perfect curve of nature that has settled in the shapes of the female body as naturally as the eye in the face. Beauty in Smolák's understanding is not an abstract aesthetic category, but a concrete, most perfect curve of nature that has settled in the shapes of the female body as naturally as the eye in the face. And his painting eye also sees what is hidden. The are unlimited variations of what Goethe called "das ewig Weibliche" (eternally feminine) and Andrej Smolák's painting works prove that.

World Distributed University, Bruxelles

“Mystical structures in the symbols of intimacy.“

Painting by academic painter Andrej Smolák has undergone several developmental stages. In the first, we follow the interest in landscape motives, inspired by the native region, in which the author applies classical painting techniques following the historical styles of Slovak and European painting. Already then, the artist's sense of character construction of the drawing, which seeks the senses of the atmosphere in nature, is clearly evident. We can evaluate it as an open-air atmospheric painting. Light, natural colors of nature, visual memory sensitively depicting human settlements, churches, houses of inhabitants of Eastern Slovakia, are essential aesthetic values of Smolák's painting, which has genre features in a good sense. Of course, we follow the harmony of figural and open-air painting done in various techniques. Perhaps the closest to the artist is the technique of watercolor, deeply felt painting with transparent watercolors. Smolák has realized the importance of the white background of watercolor, which replaces the white color and he develops an artistic process from this background. However, he brings something distinctive, namely the spatial light dynamics, where the motives live in a peculiar space, a fantasy that we could call an imaginary. Perhaps these motives are most intense in Smolák's nudes, where he celebrates the symbol of femininity as a shining human energy in the spirit of esoteric psychology. The woman is in his understanding the goddess of sensual love, something more than the beauty of the human body in Renaissance understanding. Smolák has thrown away the secular vanity of the classical nude and the transient corporality. He is trying to present a modern opinion of the world and the beauty of a human being in the sense of dream feria, where illusion appears as a free imagination.

An important stage in the painting development of Andrej Smolák is a painting style that frees itself completely from the historical concept of the image and aims for a modern avant-garde character. Each painting medium - color, space, drawing, outline, etc. becomed a general character with general meanings, and the whole work is actually a character, exactly how semantic aesthetics and art theory have defined it. Based on the latest theories, we can say that Smolák creates mystical structures in the symbols of intimacy, as the psychologist Durand says. Again, nudes appear on his paintings, but the figural motives are much more complex than the nude, and we also follow the group compositions of the figures in space. The painting space is already quite imaginary and we especially appreciate the night half dream as a special value. The nights have no continuity - this painter understood that. He uses the method of sfumato, known from the history of art, but not only in detail, on the whole surface of the painting as an infinite dimension of his aesthetic feeling too. As far as color is concerned, the artist uses allegoric brown shades, in other places cold purple, blue and green tones. He rarely uses chromatic tones, but it is related to his concept of mystical structure.

From an aesthetic point of view perhaps we could call Smolák's paintings a poetic dream structuralism, because his poetics of structures idealizes the human motive and the psychology of the figures. The idealization is defined as a certain escape from reality, that is the theoretical truth. But there is a different meaning in art, it's a poetized painting Me, me, the one I see in colors. The world of painting is doubled - in the reality of the motive and in the reality of the painting vision. Therefore, Smolák's imagination is dynamic.

Theorist, art historian, art expert, galerist, university pegagogue

“The path of searching for beauty is like the path of art. Both assume talent and are endless.”

The author's long creative development, full of search and honest work of art, has been gaining satisfaction in recent years, which is very rarely achieved. Andrej Smolák enters with a mature, clear and, in particular, developmental art program, through which talent, inventiveness and considerable technical skills transcend. This is especially confirmed by his distinctive style. Artistic expression of images in the color structure and the harmony of individual themes. Balanced composition of the painting area without unnecessary abstraction or exaggeration elements. It can be said that the aim of the author's work is clear. However, each of the paths is barely outlined, new and therefore very demanding.

Andrej Smolák is a sensitive, rather introverted type of person. But the speech of his paintings is not the opposite. His works, however concrete and realistic externally, are transcended by mysticism of the semantic structure of color and the poetics of shape. The color structure gets the author's work into the context of contemporary, modern artistic expression, and by poetics it develops the tradition of original Slovak painting, the beautiful Slovak woman. His paintings are intrinsically closed, the viewer can only open them with a long-lasting eye contact. However, they will never open themselves completely. And that is their charm and value.

Andrej Smolák paints specific women. Interesting women. He deliberately avoids a scheme of female beauty or perfection. His paintings are dynamic. Women showing in beautiful but not unified forms. The color flows down these paintings, flowing to eventually disappear, lost in irretrievable beauty. The figure is cursed in the painting, though it determines its content. But not the expression. The expression is determined by the woman's face along with the color.

The artist's "women in paintings" are aesthetic objects. He seeks harmony in them. For himself, but also for you, the audience. Only then will one understand beauty.

FF Univerzity Karlovej Praha

“Imaginary sphere of poetic composition.“

In the images of Andrej Smolák we perceive the values that lead to the future of painting, suggesting how the painters will have to go, to get out of the current blind and hopeless situation. René Hugue in the book about the fate of modern art wrote that the beginnings of the development of art in our times, seemed to him as a deed of an evil father who disinherited and drove his sons out of the house, and they then lived on their own without relation to inherited values. On the contrary, in front of the paintings of Andrej Smolák we find out that they rely on tradition, the artist's natural talent for painting, are enriched by his poetic disposition, and do not include period programs. Everything he paints, has its basis in a real motive, but painting frees him from description and brings us into the imaginary sphere of poetic composition.

The characteristic feature of his work is the observation of experience, and this is how Andrej Smolák follows the legacy of the classics and at the same time frees himself from his dependence on them, though from time to time he relies on a perfectly mastered drawing based on a real face or female nude. Thus his own visual expression gains the dramatic character, sometimes enriched with a link to the surrealists.

In this, I think, is the essential feature of the currency of his work, that he has a common way of feeling the present world with the predecessors, or rather feeling itself in the world that surrounds us. Although the expression of currency is in harmony with the history of fine arts, it is on the canvases of Andrej Smolák that it takes the form of an unrepeatable, deeply personally urgent painting expression and challenge. He is able to anthropomorphize nature as a personal experience and create an image of it with the participation of symbols or allegorical figures. The suggestiveness of his espression is multiplied by the structure of his painting, acting as a separate picture story. These are the values to which it is necessary to return in the fine arts and give them a new aesthetic mission.