Debit cards

Madona s dieťaťom (Madonna with Child) reminds us that looking after others and helping the weaker is much more important than being self-focused. Unconditionally give your time, energy, and share opportunities – without the assurance of such care being reciprocated. Only through embrace – showing concern for others and sharing – do we become human. A child’s education isn’t and should never be a zero-sum game and commercial strategy with precise calculations…

Sensitivity to the most vulnerable, selflessly giving to those who can’t reciprocate, to speak for those who can’t hear or speak for themselves, who are too small, too uninteresting, of little use. Seek out and stand with the last ones. Newspaper headlines overlook such topics, but they can really change others’ lives for the better. And ours too.

In music, a score is the complete recording of a composition – it includes notations for all instruments and vocal parts. For Monogramista T•D, rather than being a formally established manual, the score is a kind of voluntary way to note elementary components.

Such components are beyond the strict character code system, whilst also rejecting free drawing’s overly strict limitations. It’s a way to reject rational instructions through art, and suggest a playful escape from their grip.

Although Dezider Tóth often disrupts a score’s intervals of original linear structure, he always adheres to its overall framework and mission.

Ivana Šáteková’s work targets diverse themes, and the visual language also differs from project to project depending on the theme. Her main visual inspirations are comics, folklore and folk art.

She has long sought a form of contemporary Slovak folklore – including formal language – with contemporary features. She holds up a mirror to Slovak society (and others), reflecting both that which is unsavoury and very necessary. The debit card’s artwork is from the Hore hajl, dole hajl (Up Heil, Down Heil) embroidery series, where the artist seeks a contemporary expression of folklore. It disrupts the idealised portrayal of Slovaks as commonly depicted in folk imagery.

Altamira is a larger cycle of the artist’s work from the mid-1970s and expressed through various media. The common starting point is a computer drawing of the transformation of a Paleolithic bull into a symbol of infinity.

It’s a representation of movement – not futuristic-mechanical, but as a dialectical transformation of one quality into another. It’s a symbol of overcoming long periods of time. The visual transition – the play between seemingly unrelated entities – is about overcoming the discontinuity.

It is – for the author – a fascinating unification of the lapidary motif with computer technology.