Coming from a bucolic place, embracing pastoral life and living in close contact with nature, Andrej Dubravsky has been pushing the limits of self-presentation and the inquiries around the themes of identity, metaphore and portrayal.
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Born in Slovakia, in 1987, Andrej Dubravsky lives and works in his farm, near Bratislava, where a variety of natural elements and the rhythm of nature itself, strongly influence his daily routine and artistic research. Surrounded by hens, roosters, larvae, butterflies and flowers, Dubravsky spends his time at the village painting en plein air, embracing the so called “joie de vivre”, while expressing the strong feeling of connection and empathy that the artist feels towards nature. An old-fashioned approach to everyday life, that in the artist’s opinion, allows him to understand more deeply the problems of the cohabitation between industrial society and its naturalistic roots. “It’s just much easier to be empathic to environment if you experience such things on your own skin”.
Besides the artist’s love for idillic representations and pastoral elements, one of the main drives of Dubravsky’s work is certainly the male body, in all of its gayness and joyness, a topic that inevitably puts the Slovakian painter in contact with a variety of declensions of narcissistic self-presentation in contemporary, post-industrial life. Symbols and metaphores give Dubravsky the possibility to create a form of transversal story-telling, in which the artist’s “ultimate fetish” for bunny-masks, acts as an allegory of his own personality, enabling each of his paintings to act as examples of highly individual, double-edged, metaphoric self-portraits.
Naif, romantic and fragile souls live on the surface of Andrej Dubravsky’s canvases, a surface where the artist expresses his vision of a post-industrial, former socialist world; describing a feeling of dominance, strongly connected to the principles of pleasure and pain. In this highly expressive and narcissistic landscape, Dubravsky invites the viewer to dive into an unknown journey, following a path that leads to an unknown land, made of visual language regarding sexual minorities and innermost passions; an idillic setting made of masquerades and glorification of the contemporary youth’s sexual awakening and emancipation.
A painterly style that is highly connected to the thin-line of our fragile ecosystem, that speaks to the viewer about our society’s discouragement regarding the loss of our naturalistic equilibrium. A balance that has been lost ever since nature has been “dominated” and transformed into an amusement park, where larvae, butterflies and winking men, live amongst industrial poisoned waters, where hypocrisy and humbug create cheap and immensely unnatural rules. Andrej Dubravsky is a young and extremely energetic example of knowledge and understanding of the rules of nature, a crucial element that brings the painter close to Apollinaire’s magnificent theories, and allows us viewers, to once again understand the importance of the great mind that can be found behind a great painting.
Cover image: Andrej Dubravsky, Untitled (drink orders), 2020. Acrylic and oil pastel on canvas
Written by Mario Rodolfo Silva
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