The word metro finds its origin in the Greek mētēr, i.e. – mother. From there the term is further transferred to the word metropolis, i.e. – the mother city, the place of belonging, belonging, origin. In his artistic work, Marek Fexa searches for his place in this world. The individual in the city, often out of context, turned away from his loved ones, struck by loneliness in the ornament of the civilised world, gropes for a way to locate himself. The key becomes precisely the others – the beings with whom the perceiving subject passes by in transitive, fleeting moments – moments woven precisely by their transience. The inhabited present organizes bodily experience into shimmering abstract formations, shrouded in anonymity. We hardly recognize ourselves. It is the process of slowing down, of empathic emotional touch with an alien being, that opens up a relieving space revealing the possibility of anchoring oneself precisely because of the other – through the other. The stranger, though distant, has a material essence and therefore affirms our own. Marek Fexa captures the experience of this time with extraordinary mindfulness and kindness – the author's study of gestures, attitudes, interactions, depicts sudden bursts of tenderness, small islands of contact in an otherwise isolated reality.

In a kind of melancholic turn, the protagonists then become child characters – the position of a child who is only just being constituted in lived reality through language and experience. A metaphorical counterpoint, a transparent message inside out, are landscapes and still lifes, through which the author turns inward, thus formulating his inner landscape in which he finds himself. They function as a perceptual transmission of a fleeting, vulnerable moment, in which the light reaches and the shadows pile up, soon to be obscured by the layers of memory, and all the more intense now, bubbling to the surface. A moment that recedes, that passes into irreversibility, and yet, despite this, is firmly etched in the heart of the one who experiences it.

Curator: Nataša Hand