source: dvoraksec

Born 1978 in Bratislava, Slovakia
Lives and works in Bratislava

Martin Sedlak (1978) is a graduate of Fine Arts in Bratislava and is one of the most prominent personalities of the young generation of artists in the Slovak art scene. His work currently includes a wide range of diverse media ranging from sculpture to painting, photography and installations. In general, minimalism in Sedlák’s work relates particularly to its formal part. However, even this stateme The work of Martin Sedlák depends on a human being, his perception, associations, experience. In the author’s opinion, a personal relationship is created between his artwork and a viewer’s vision, and this relationship gives rise to the intimacy of objects. In this case, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology can be applied to the artwork itself which is more prominent than the inner world of the author. That alone does not guarantee the meaning of an artwork – the meaning of an artwork comes into existence only through the dialogue of the artwork and its viewer.

The integral part of objects of Martin Sedlák is the medium of light. By using it in the creation of his artworks, he attains the effect when an object ‘pulls’ relations out from the artwork and makes them a function of space, light, and viewer’s field of vision. There is the moment when everything in the artwork lies in the action of light. Sedlák also has his special way how to place light in his works with relation to space where they are installed. Luminescent tapes or light fibres illuminate surrounding surface areas, and objects often look immaterial, as if they would have reached the state independent of themselves.

When targeting viewer’s sensation, Sedlák’s objects open new possibilities of view or perception that can bring some puzzlement, which is usually pleasant in this case. Pleasant uncertainty welcomes the play of imagination and supports the search of various ways how to grasp what is seen. Objects of Martin Sedlák which follow a clear artistic concept and which are focused on the perception of an artwork by its viewer radiate magnetizing atmosphere and posses a kind of transcendental aura. They change their immediate surroundings into the ethereal environment, and at the local scene of contemporary art they represent ‘a tasting’ of very delicate, intellectually endowed, and in its way generally valid art. Sedlák confidentially reacts to the period in which he creates his work, he has a natural inclination to experiments with materials and technologies that he uses in a clear and direct way, and at the same time, he naturally shifts borders of separate media to the sphere of mysteries, even fiction. And despite the fact that with time the term beautiful was moved to the category of critical terms in the context of visual art theory, Sedlák’s objects are often truly beautiful thanks to their simplicity, sophistication, and effect evoked by their complexity.