ONDŘEJ ROUBÍK

MATĚJ SNÍLEK

21. 3. – 25. 4. 2013

„My name is Matej Snilek. I am thirty and I live with my mum and dad in a house inherited from my granddad just outside Prague. I love it there because the Nature is all around us. Fields and woods and also a pond where I go from time to time to feed fishes and ducks. About two years ago, I decided to start my studies. I wanted to study law but I was told that I was slightly “slower” and that’s why they could not accept me at the Law School. I was told that I certainly would not have been able to keep up with other students. And even if I would, I could never be allowed to act for any institution or to defend anybody with such a way of thinking. In any trial or proceedings. I never understood what they meant by that. I was sad for about two years. But why I am telling you all this… it’s just a few days ago that something happened to me. Something what totally changed my life. I began to believe. A bit in myself and a bit in a God. It’s true that I still cannot decide in which one. But it does not bother me too much because I trust at least to myself for now. I began to believe that if I want to influence, create or not to do anything, I am fully entitled to do so. To start with, I have decided to create something. So I have created the World, as it should have always been. Each morning, each evening and even before each meal I pray honestly: “Matej, you know very well that anything you can see or feel around is true and real. So is the truth and so is your persuasion. Ships do not sink. The World without scoundrels is like a summer tree without leaves and the saints are saints because they doubt most of all. People do not leave each other. Ghosts are protecting us, not haunting. In a situation when everybody runs as much as he can to be able to do anything in the World, to stop moving and remain stopped – this is something what requires every effort. You know that it is good to be like this and if not, you are not a Dreamer. Do not let it be otherwise, Matej. You belong to me and I belong to you and I bless myself in that.” I let myself to engulf in that and I am glad of it as I am strong at last. I already know that this creative force must not be underestimated even though it comes from the joy of a fool. When I was the loneliest person in the last two years, I learned painting for my pleasure, day by day. And I painted eight paintings as I wanted to. My mum and dad say that I succeeded in it and that I can show them easily in an exhibition in the city. So I am doing that. These pictures are just about one thing – that a man can lose his common sense if he rejects his right to think about light as about a sort of darkness. And what he learns, it is only a sort of all that what he has already known for a long time. Since my faith to which I converted is nothing else than a sort of Matej who goes from time to time to the pond to feed fishes and ducks, while being slower, I found out rightly that in such a faith I cannot do anything what would be completely useless.“
Ondrej Roubik (1988), AVU Prague (Jiri Petrbok) and The Prince’s Drawing School, London. His new series deals with interconnection of seemingly realistic painting with specific seemingly realistic story of “one particular” man.