The exhibition follows several central motifs that repeatedly occur in Pešta’s work and that in varied artistic approaches offer multiple layers of significance and context.

 

Pešta’s key element is a mask – an imprint of his own face. But on another level it can also be perceived as a symbol of pretence that when multiplied creates a shapeless mass lacking any characteristic traits.

 

Similarly, the lives of ancestors in fgenetic code structure, meld into a contiguous mass. People’s faces and figures suddenly become a mere structural element that forms a future individual and his private, family, and social stereotypes.

 

Pešta sees man’s lot as a desperate Sisyphean effort, which he depicted in a series of video art pieces that accompany the viewer throughout the entire exhibition, and in which naked bodies trudge along, enclosed in transparent cubes.

 

Daniel Pešta works with a number  of symbolic parables, but his critique often focuses on specific targets. It touches upon subjects such as the absurdity of politics, the hypocrisy of the Church, the tragedy of the Holocaust, the stigmatization of social minorities, and gender stereotypes. The moment an individual is subsumed by a nameless mob, an institution, a political group, or for example just a school class, he is in danger of also becoming a victim, or on the contrary an instrument of injustice.

 

In the impossible situation of the human race, Pešta nevertheless sees a certain hope, which he depicted in an unconventional manner in his Annunication series. His contemporary sexless Madonnas and mutated Christ figures are stripped of direct religious context and seem like a universal symbol of individuality that defied its determination and has bridged it. In every future life there slumbers a promise that a new person will be able to fulfil his singular destiny and touch a transcendental dimension of existence.