Beauty, as a concept or category, and in fact a subjective human perception, has many visual forms and layers of meaning. Although it primarily represents an aesthetically positive value, it is primarily an abstract concept, one we sometimes almost waste, and it usually also depends on the conventions of the time—it's a socio-cultural phenomenon through which we quickly judge and classify. This is why sarcasm often accompanies it. Historically, the concept of aesthetics was most explored by antiquity. It viewed beauty as a manifestation of divine goodness or as order and symmetry. The peak of beauty came during the Renaissance, and the definition of the so-called golden ratio integrated the status of a harmonious whole, with which art has worked since time immemorial.
For Kunc, however, beauty oscillates between colorful narratives of awkward realism, half acknowledging ostentation and subjectivism, pleasure, and bliss in a metaphorical sense, yet intentionally set in a mirror of our current global luxury, wastefulness, or sometimes even the desirable loss of memory, touching upon falsehood in the nobility of kitsch. Kunc masterfully participates, in a modern manner, in both surrealism and the pop-art shorthand of his essential "Eastern" branch (EAST-POP), rousing with his distinctive rebellion and sarcasm, but not mockery—he offers the viewer the opportunity to choose what they feel, what is dear to them in the universe and the time- or magic-space of the world, in the freedom of imagination.
The author himself presents various views on our civilization in his work over several decades; the exhibition also features the author's historical works, as more than 3/4 of his life was spent living, working, and exhibiting outside his homeland (after the occupation in 1968, he went into exile). Semantically and thematically, Milan Kunc draws from the realities of the Western world, a world that was then unique and unrepeatable, from the liberalism of the 1960s—contrasted with our totalitarian normalization, and in terms of feedback to global globalization and its "beautiful" decline. Kunc’s wonderfully beautiful world screams against its very nature and provokes us to a philosophical reflection on what we, here and now, expect from beauty itself: whether the ideal of beauty from the time, translated into material iconodulism, or the beautiful, almost divine ideal of the era.
Milan Kunc considers painting itself to be one of the freest expressions of human existence. Based on his experiences, travels, and creative expeditions, he has developed a style that works with our subconscious similarly to the visual tool of advertising: “Life itself just excites me, and so I’ve never been bored since I was a child…”
