Martin Michael Stiltenn
Born on 21 August 1974 in Moravská Třebová. He is a pure-blooded autodidact, since childhood he has been intensely involved in artistic activities, especially drawing, but he never studied at any art school and was originally trained in the now extinct craft of button-maker-pearl maker. Before he began to fully devote himself to his art, he worked a number of blue-collar jobs.
At a relatively young age, he became a casual viewer of J. Švankmajer’s short film “The Apartment” and was completely fascinated by this experience. His innate inner relationship to the fantastic, the bizarre, the strange and everything that deviates fully awakens and is subsequently further strengthened by an article in a magazine dedicated to surrealism. Photographs of paintings by Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy solidify his fascination. These intense experiences are the primary and decisive influence for him, thanks to which he discovers his continent.
He is undoubtedly a solitaire with a relatively wide creative scope, including paintings, objects, sculptures, collages, drawings, assemblages, but also original artistic jewelry made of genuine natural mother-of-pearl. However, the list of his creative expressions does not end there, he continues, not least, with authorial writing, he devotes himself to automatic drawing and, last but not least, film is his medium. He moves along the border of many interfaces, one could say that he is also a representative of contemporary Informel, although he himself does not recognize and does not like any kind of classification.
His work, raw and harrowing in many ways, contains something that causes unease, that mysterious “ungraspable”. He thus brings strange objects and fetishes with elements of animism, dreamy, delightful horror, but also elements of the absurd, biting humor and sarcasm into our world. Ancient machines towering from the landscapes of his imagination, under layers and deposits, under the crust of the passage of time, sleeping and dreaming their Machine Dreams, or interwoven mechanical organisms of Post-Apocalyptic Brides pulled out of timelessness, like totemistic remains of the distant future… Although often appearing ominous at first glance, they also speak of something kindly terrifying. It is his own cult shrouded in mystery and enigma. The viewer often has the feeling that the work is observing him and looking into the very depths of his being…
Absurdity and imagination are the main principles of his work in many diverse forms and all possible appearances, often beyond the limits of graspability. All this is seasoned with sarcastic, biting and often cynical humor. His source of inspiration is not only dream experiences or childhood memories, but also everyday situations, which he himself says he 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 hidden best”. He completely ignores commercial styles and fashion trends and as he himself says:
“Creation is above all freedom and one must always stand outside the mass stream dictating trends.” Each of us has that famous mysterious object of desire hidden within us. But it depends on each person whether they can admit it and recognize it as their own, regardless of the opinions and attitudes of others.”
Prof. J. Prokop
Photo: author’s archive