Martin Michael Stiltenn
He was born on August 21, 1974 in Moravská Třebová. He is a pure-bred autodidact, from childhood he was intensively devoted to art, especially drawing, but he never studied at any art school and was originally trained in the now defunct craft of button-pearl maker. Before he began to devote himself fully to creation, he went through a number of blue-collar jobs.
At a relatively young age, he becomes an accidental viewer of J. Švankmajer’s short film „The Apartment“ and is completely fascinated by this experience. His innate visceral relationship to fantasy, bizarreness, the strange and everything deviant is subsequently further enhanced by an article in a magazine dedicated to surrealism, with examples of the work of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. These intense experiences are the primary and decisive influence for him, thanks to which he discovers his continent…
He is without a doubt a solitaire with a relatively wide creative range, including paintings-objects, objects, collages, drawings, automatic drawings, assemblages, jewelry and last but not least, original writing and film. He moves along the borders of many interfaces, it can be said that he is also a representative of contemporary informality and surrealism, although he himself does not recognize and does not like any kind of pigeonholing. His work, raw and harrowing in many ways, contains something unsettling, the mysterious „ungraspable“. The viewer often has the feeling that the work is observing him and peering down to the very bottom of his being… In this way, he brings into our world strange objects and fetishes with elements of animism, dreamy, delightful horror, but also elements of the absurd, biting humor and sarcasm. From the landscapes of his imagination, ancient machines, beneath the layers and deposits, under the crust of the passage of time, sleeping and dreaming their machine dreams, or interconnected mechanical organisms, post-apocalyptic brides pulled out of timelessness, as totemistic remnants of the ancient future… Although often at first glance ominous, but at the same time, something kindly terrifying speaks out of them. It is his own cult shrouded in mystery and mystery.
Absurdity and imagination are the main principles of his work in many diverse forms and all possible forms, often beyond the limit of grasp. All this seasoned with sarcastic, biting and often even cynical humor. The source of inspiration for him is not only dream experiences or memories from childhood, but also everyday situations, which he himself is only a „mere witness“ and which contain, in his words, „The secret face of things and events, publicly exposed and at the same time best hidden“. . He completely ignores commercial styles and fashion trends and as he says:
“Creation is above all freedom and it is always necessary to stand out from the mass stream dictating trends.” Each of us has the mysterious mysterious object of desire hidden in us, but it is up to everyone to be able to acknowledge and recognize it as their own, regardless of the opinions and attitudes of others. “
prof. J. Prokop
Photo by: Petr Kopřiva