ŠIMON BOLCEK

How Life Imitates Film

Painting Studio 1

I feel that the individual images reference various film genres and that for you genre is not merely about a visual style, but rather a specific way of interpreting a situation. Is there a framework you use to assign particular film genres to specific personal experiences?
I am glad the images affect you in various ways. For me, the key to choosing a genre is found in the emotions or feelings I am experiencing at that moment with my loved ones, friends, and family. The color palette and composition that build the image’s overall atmosphere develop from that.

Movie posters have traditionally been associated with commercialism. As part of your artistic practice, do you perceive it more as a form of “low-brow” visual language, or do you consciously avoid such a distinction?
I certainly don’t avoid it, but I naturally view the movie poster as a form whose visual impact is meant to attract people. The airbrush technique is part of this, as it is associated with commercial aesthetics and allows for many interesting effects. So, in a way, I perceive the poster as “low-brow,” but at the same time I am fascinated by its compositional sophistication, which I try to use and work with in different ways. I strive to find the boundary between the image and the poster.

When I compare your Bachelor’s thesis with your Master’s thesis, it is hard not to notice that you have shifted significantly from working with self-contained units to a more fragmentary approach. To what extent does this shift represent a fundamental change in your approach to storytelling?
I think it is a major shift in the way I tell stories. In my Bachelor’s thesis, I worked with paraphrases of historically known paintings, their interpretations, the hierarchy of figures, and context. However, the scene was constructed as a whole. The fragmentary nature of the poster allows me to place figures, still lifes and landscapes within the image and layer them freely on top of one another. The fragments thus provide the viewer with the illusion of a story and function as a collage assembled from various parts of a plotline for a fictional film.

photo: Polina Davydenko