Selficated

"It's not important who I am. It's important what I do." One of the most compelling actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, once remarked. This statement stuck in my head and I keep returning to it now, working on an exhibition with Viktor Frešo. Because what happens to this idea if what you do is about who you are? Especially if we are dealing with an exhibition of self-portraits. Which brings me to another statement from the very same person: "there is no self." A well-known Buddhist anatta (non-self doctrine) teaches that we are a constantly changing collection of physical and mental processes.

Viktor Frešo's art used to be interpreted as very much self-oriented. Even his own projects and their titles helped shape this narrative. We can go back to his Ego-art project, or Who is the King? photo series with twisted role play, when celebrities took photos of the artist instead of being photographed by him. But it's not necessary to know Viktor Frešo's whole oeuvre to notice that the exaggerated, almost cartoonish scale of his self-portraits' heads has grown into various forms and became a kind of integrated symbolism in his work. Whether it's spherical objects, heads with carved basic recognizable features like eyes, mouth, nose, circular heads varied into different sculptural forms, or the circle as a basic motif in his countless paintings, which share the common title OverHeads. Viktor as an artist, and he and his "I," have always been present in his work. One could say that his work is founded on the self.

In recent years he went even deeper into work about his identity and roots, mainly through research about his family, which spans generations of prominent Czechoslovak artists across various fields, actors, directors, musicians, and more. This extensive, multi-year research has turned into several museum exhibitions such as Family Vintage (Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum, Bratislava, Slovakia) and Family Refresh (Galéria Jána Koniarka, Trnava, Slovakia), where Viktor Frešo collected, analyzed, remixed, and created objects and visual materials from his ancestors' estates. His most recent exhibition projects, Future Memories (GVUO The Gallery of Fine Arts in Ostrava, Czech Republic) and Objects Against Memories (Barvinskyi Gallery, Vienna, Austria), as their titles suggest, have shifted from the physical realm into the realm of memory—something more abstract, but similarly to objects condensed by time and functioning as carriers of emotions.

Olivia Lang, a well-known writer, in a recent podcast on the topic of the Self said that "memories are like a mixing desk." I find this a funny coincidence, because a mixing desk is the very first object one sees when entering Viktor Frešo's studio. Its presence, along with some other musical equipment, is due to music being an integral part of his practice, which he writes, creates, and occasionally performs with great passion and humility.

I take this idea about memories as an important metaphor for Viktor Frešo's 30 years of practice. Just as in a recording studio, where different sounds are combined on a mixing desk, his work brings together layers of ideas and materials, which he then selects, adjusts, and balances to create the final work.

I return once more to the Buddhist doctrine of non-self, describing existence as a constantly changing collection of physical and mental processes. Could this not be seen as another way of describing the act of creating art? Perhaps the more an artist's work engages with the theme of the self, the more it allows for a certain detachment; and conversely, the more it concretizes around the artist's personal identity, the more it becomes anonymized into a subject with which others can identify.

I have always sensed this peculiar dichotomy in Viktor Frešo’s work. I still recall his very personal 2005 series of textual panels, What Helped Me When…, which, without any guidance or instructions, allows the viewer to find collective solutions to problems that concern us all through his personal experiences.

Even in this exhibition, where we see nine self-portraits, the figure recedes in favor of gesture, layering, and the texture of the oil paint itself. At times, the lines of the figure emerge clearly; at others, they dissolve entirely. It is a play in which the self is sometimes dominant, sometimes nearly absent.

On one of Viktor Frešo’s largest recent exhibitions, Family Vintage, an entire wall was devoted to a plotted quote by his father, the musician Fedor Frešo: “The worst thing is when an artist takes himself too seriously.” I find this statement frames Viktor’s approach to the self very well; in both his work and life, he has always adhered to it.