Slovakia
Miro Trubač
The work of Miro Trubac centers on figural narrative sculpture and small statues. Trubac's work can be interpreted in three aspects: hobby sculpture, irony and work with iconography. His hobby sculpture is understood as a that which makes a theme of the intimacy of the home, as well as the minute scale of the statues, which can be created at home without much demands in terms of space and technology. Trubac employs irony as a tool of communication, by which means he swaps around the roles of individual actors in his sculpted scenes, or shifts the motif into a diametrically different context, thus building a situational paradox that creates a vision of sarcasm. Iconography gives Trubac the chance to reinterpret tried and true solutions from art history, thus detracting from the original motif and imputing to it something new and diametrically opposed or reworking sacred or profane motifs with a visual language that is non-historical and contemporary.
My work is characterised by a deep interest in relationships. They influence each of us and are a major aspect of social interaction. Every relationship enhances our personality and enables us to find our place in society and understand ourselves. My choice was a return to the sculptural figure devoid of ideology, political associations, or purely conceptual thinking. I am trying to tell stories that often draw on my memories and situations that seem paradoxical, absurd, and unsolvable.
The narrative as the basis of emotional conflict has always been important to me. I reflect on the situations that shape my values. My sculptural agenda focuses on the family environment, on my surroundings and personal experiences, thus I newly create them in the form of figure compositions and enhance my relationship to reality. An inseparable part of my work is my personal experience, my introspective immersion into myself with the aim to capture a substantial moment, a gesture or detail of the experienced, but also of the intended or supposed. I cherish, in an intrinsic and almost destructive way, the feeling of doubt, as it has often helped me to find strength to make progress. In the company of other people, I prefer to withdraw and watch in silence, having an inner monologue. In the silence of the studio, I interpret the visual sensations of the observed reality through narrative figure compositions, seeking answers to the questions that I have not raised.
Most frequently I focus on the male world, on masculine problems. In principle, I am interested in the male world, I am fascinated by male role models, even by the fact that I belong to the world of men. I am captivated by the position and the role of the man in the present, changed and transformed, because the traditional model of the man as a “hero” and the master of creation, a preferably active individual, is no longer valid.
Manhood has become an attitude. The problems of relationships have recently become public topics, and it is therefore natural that, in addition to public policies, research and documents on solely private topics are part of social problems. In the case of male studies, “individualism” has shifted from the heroic significance to the meaning of loss and failure. The expansion of the themes of male studies, the crisis of manhood and the branching of these meanings, for example in finding male role models, comparing the possibilities of following them (for instance the public theme of the crisis of authority).
I refer to the history of sculpture, to Christian and political motifs and male figures appearing in my work in the form of protagonists of everyday situations, in which they draw attention to the present reality of life – the position of the human being in society, his loneliness and confusion. With the elements of morality, these heroes try to instruct and illustrate in an informal comic way the many failures that stem from the essence of human nature and are part of human existence as such.
