Since 2003 Jiří Ptáček has been developing a reflection of a trouble-free modern style in collections of paintings using coloured acrylic paints. These paintings react mainly to the current role of publicity and media manipulation, but also suggest a general tendency to escape to a virtual world free of real problems.
It is a thematically and formally antithetical cycle, in which loneliness and the existential uncertainty of the early collection of dark paintings steps aside for an expression of human anchorage in a modern life-style – the seamlessness of which advertising slogans and graphics try to convince us every day. This everyday media manipulation, evoked by economic interests, finds a successful response especially in subconscious tendencies – in subordination to dominance and longing for happiness and perfection. It is based mainly on the idea of the world being reduced to visual values, which subjugate the disorientated man in the modern world with their offensive pandering to every whim, drowning out his traditional value system with never-ending information stimuli.
In this collection Jiri Ptacek attempts to reflect the current tendency of people to hide in a virtual world free of the immediacy of real problems rather than facing up to reality. His pieces have, in themselves, a fascination with the ideal, but hardly sustainable, state of utopia, calmness and brightness which is confronted with a much more dramatic reality. The artist chose to use acrylics in bright colours and stencils in his work on this theme.