Post by Massimo Pollini.

Prague-based, Slovakian artist Matei Kren has created a number of enormous book sculptures at museums and galleries throughout Europe. In 2006, he installed the acclaimed work “ Book Cell Project ”  at the Centro de Arte Moderne in Lisbon and more recently the challenging “Scanner” installation conceived for the Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna.

Throughout his career, Matej Krén, among the most important Slovakian contemporary artists, has focused mainly on the means of elaboration and transmission of knowledge, establishing suggestive links between their historical and ideological relativity and the experimentation with many forms of optical and perceptual illusion.

The narrow inside space, multiplied and complicated by mirrors, evoke a sensation of sublime terror, an alteration referring to a puzzling infinity itself created to destabilize conventional spatial habits. Mirrors become an instrument to create illusion and, at the same time, to unmask it. Since the public can easily see themselves reflected in a false infinite – thus discovering the illusion – the problem becomes the latency of perception.

Chosen because of their nature as seat of knowledge, as symbols of intrinsically human free thought, books are here “used” as raw materials for an artistic process existing and communicating on many distinct levels.