Coming Up for Air is the title of a lesser-known novel by George Orwell about disillusionment with the modern world, written shortly before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Through the character of George Bowling, the author reflects on how industrialization, consumerism, and the approaching war are uncompromisingly changing society and individuals.

Miroslav Sandanus’ exhibition moves in a similar atmosphere influenced by growing social and environmental crises. His latest series of large-format figurative paintings depicts people dressed in transparent raincoats. If we look at the motif of the cloak through the history of painting, we could talk about drapery as an important element not only in terms of aesthetics but also in terms of meaning. Similar to Renaissance masters who studied the folds of fabric in their paintings to express movement and emotion with an emphasis on the symbolic meaning of nobility or spirituality, the author approaches this tradition in a specific way. With hyperrealistic painting, he captures with precision every glint of shiny material, every tension or crease of the foil on the body of the figure. However, it is not just technical virtuosity—the plastic clothing in the paintings takes on a strange, even disturbing presence. In Hypermodern Times, French philosopher Gilles Lipovetzky describes a society that renounces grand ideologies and replaces them with individual consumption, constantly adapting to rapidly changing conditions with the illusion of personal freedom. Miroslav Sandanus’ paintings seem to illustrate this state of affairs and evoke a strange mixture of tension, resignation, and fusion. Despite the cold and synthetic structure of the material, we can observe a partially deformed image of the body beneath it in the paintings. Human identity is lost or emerges from the transparent isolation of plastic, which on the one hand protects people from weather conditions, but on the other hand becomes a sterile membrane between humans and nature or the surrounding world. In the context of the monopolization of social networks, we can also talk about social bubbles in which individuals are exposed only to information and opinions that are in line with their own beliefs.

Orwell’s book Coming Up for Air ends with the realization that a return to the old world is impossible. The main character tries to relive his past, but finds that the world he remembered no longer exists. Sandanus’ paintings likewise do not create space for escapism, but rather for moments of concentration, of breathing.

Miroslav Sandanus (*1994, Žilina) is one of the prominent figures of young Slovak painting. He lives and works in Rajecké Teplice. His paintings reflect on the ecological crisis and its impact on the landscape. His works are characterized by monumentality, a strong atmosphere, dramatic compositions, and tension between nature and human activity. In 2024, he won the Painting of the Year award for his work SAFE, which impressed the international jury with its balance of painterly quality and strong content. He studied at the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica and in the studio of Rastislav Podobu, where he won the Rector’s Award and the Dean’s Award. In his work, he often deals with themes of devastated landscapes and environmental disasters, but also social isolation under the influence of technological progress. In 2023, he had solo exhibitions at the Rosenfeld Palace in Žilina, the Nitra Gallery, and the Orava Gallery in Dolný Kubín. He participated in collective exhibitions Nedomov at the Regional Gallery in Prešov, The Human Face – Freedom or Death in Frankfurt am Main, and in 2020–2024 in exhibitions of the finalists of the Painting of the Year competition in Nedbalka.

The exhibition of Miroslav Sandanus’ works under the title Balans offers space for a deeper excursion into the current themes he deals with in his work. An attempt to find the right balance between living and survival, between the demands in an individual’s life and the survival of the planet. Between what “I” want and what is still permissible. Every day we balance on the edge of our choices. There is always a choice. Miro Sandanus bends the ecological issue in his work in a way that draws the viewer into the discussion. He does not moralise, leaving room for the reverberation of large-scale canvases and portrait records of nature. He admits to a fascination with the daily changing sky that heralds more or less expected changes. Each consequence has its cause, which can often be discovered before anything happens. The abstraction of the transformations of the simple everyday is written by the author in a hyper-realistic portrait diary.

A powerful cycle that preceded the pursuit of an elusive universe were the works under the common title Apathy. In it, the figure emerges as part of an ecosystem. Two inseparable worlds that influence each other. In an outwardly defined indifference, the author uncovers the deeper underlying layers of the depicted figures and their inner world. Parallel to the eye of the observer, he reveals the call, silence, search, distance, fear, apprehension, isolation. Despite the ongoing crises (both global and individual), there is the hope of a new beginning. The exhibition Balance also presents works that preceded the recent series Illusions, from which the winning work Painting of the Year 2024, titled Safe, comes. Miroslav Sandanus develops several themes in parallel in his research on painting. The balance between reality and the boundaries of isolation in the virtual world is a challenge he is currently facing in his artistic programme.

Marcel Proust’s words from his work Days of Reading (1933) also reflect the intention of the exhibition Balance: ‘Thanks to works of art we descend into the depths of our interior. Through them we conjure up images of forgotten moments, of vague memories. It is the work of art that opens a gateway within us to dwellings where we could not enter on our own.” The works of Miroslav Sandanus offer the viewer the opportunity to pause, to perceive existence in contexts. Just as symbolically, the layout of the newly opened ASISI Gallery makes it possible. To see a foothold in a fluid world in daylight and in interconnectedness.

The colours in the sky evoke many feelings in us. We associate red clouds with sunrise or sunset, we admire the aurora borealis. However, there may be other signs in the sky that evoke impending danger by their distinctive colour.

In his paintings, Miroslav Sandanus captures the feelings of several members of the younger generation, standing in the face of gradually unfolding global crises – mainly ecological, but also pandemics and war. He is interested in the view of a landscape altered by human activity, but he does not avert his gaze from the emotions that these crises bring upon us, such as anger, fear or apathy. To this end, the figure often returned to the landscape in his paintings, personifying these feelings in facial expressions, but also without them, through body language alone.

In his latest exhibition project at the Jules Binder Gallery, he presents paintings in which just the opposite psychologicalisation appears in the landscape, through tonality of colour. Views of cities and the sky evoke feelings of fear, of a threat that is not yet here, but can already be felt. These are not only clouds and swirling atmospheric formations similar to tornadoes (no longer so rare in our parts of the world), but also completely overcast skies, the location of which cannot be precisely identified. The common feature is the distinctive colours, especially shades of red and orange, which are also the signalling colours. They represent a state of high alert, when one must be prepared to leave a potentially threatened area. In addition to the immediate danger, they also represent a more complex sense of the greater threat that ‘hangs’ over us as a society as a whole. This is not just an environmental issue, but also a number of events that are disrupting our socio-political order.

Miroslav Sandanus (*1994, Žilina) graduated from the Master’s degree of the Open Studio of Painting under Mgr. Art. Rastislav Podobu, ArtD. at the AU in Banská Bystrica. He has had a number of successful solo and collective exhibitions mainly in Slovak cities such as Žilina, Dolný Kubín, Bratislava, Banská Štiavnica, Trenčín, Nitra and many others. He has also presented his work abroad at collective exhibitions in Paris, Cologne and Venice. In 2023, 2022, 2021 he was a finalist in the Painting of the Year competition, and in 2020 he was ranked 3rd. In 2022, he was the winner of the Martin Benka Prize. He currently lives and works in Žilina.

The exhibition space of the Rosenfeld Palace in Žilina was filled for the whole summer with paintings by a young artist – painter, a graduate of the Open Studio of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Academy of Arts in Banská Bystrica. Master of Fine Arts, Miroslav Sandanus formed his relationship to classical painting at the secondary art school in Žilina. At the Academy his artistic practice, focused on landscape and man in it, united in harmony and conflict, took shape. A very well mastered painting technique is supported by insightful themes in his works. There can be no doubt about his industriousness – after all, this is his tenth solo exhibition in a row and after three years he is once again addressing the Žilina public, although in 2020 it was mainly on a virtual plane.

The generous space of the Rosenfeld Palace allowed for the stratification of the paintings, which seem to unfold on several planes. Miroslav Sandanus confirms his unflagging interest in environmental themes, in natural disasters and also his fascination with natural phenomena that everyone probably prefers to observe from afar – storms, tempests or fire. In addition, he also delves into the world of people, which in his rendition is sort of gloomy and mysterious. The connection between nature and man also brings new feelings and questions.

Perhaps it is a bit symbolic that the tenth exhibition is spread over ten rooms. And its title Observation refers not only to the artist’s works, but it is also an instruction on how an attentive viewer should approach his paintings. It is not a chronological arrangement, but rather a thematic and intuitive one. Moving from room to room, where the large paintings are complemented by smaller, more intimate works, will allow everyone to find themselves in a different position of the painter’s interest. The possibility of layering paradoxically makes the paintings more connected – they communicate with each other through open doors and through peripheral vision. In addition to the visual experience, since Miroslav himself is also a musician, in the three rooms the paintings are complemented by sounds, more or less harmonious, a little melodic a little disturbing, and this multimedia experience completes the complex perception of the painter’s world. We stand in front of devastated interiors, in a dark forest, in front of lightning in a graceful sky or in the middle of a cold landscape covered with snow and ice, in other rooms of the palace the forest burns in front of our eyes, we are hypnotized by the gazes of expressive portraits or we are frustrated by the figures of anonymous human beings shrouded in raincoats…

We observe the interconnections through the painter’s handwriting, the constantly refining and loosening of the form, so important for a good painting. From the many subject positions, it might indeed seem that the young artist is always searching, exploring, observing. But rather, it is clear from the paintings that Miroslav Sandanus is a sensitive and insightful person, a careful observer of his environment, whose work only confirms that the journey itself can be a destination and, as I wrote a few years ago, an interesting visual adventure.

Doomscrolling (the excessive absorption of negative news online) is a syndrome that has arisen from a perfect storm of intersecting crises and the ever-available high-speed internet. We can’t help it, and since our mobiles allow it, we often spend hours of empty time reading catastrophic news. The number of voices in this confusion is endless, and it doesn’t have to be just the experts. Anyone today can present their opinion and vision of things and every voice added to this cacophony can be rewarded with the same notification. Ding, ding, ding.

For Miroslav Sandanus, the problem of the environmental crisis and the fears associated with it is a key part of the painter’s practice. In his latest series, he searches for the roots of our anxiety, finding them in an endless feed of sometimes contradictory information. He does not analyze the reasons, but traces the emotional level of their impact on the individual. To a much greater extent than before, he concentrates on the human being, whose identity, however, remains anonymous, as in his previous works. In doing so, he studies the range of emotions that distort the face beyond recognition, such as anger, irritation and exasperation. Or he captures faces obscured by despair. Illuminated by blue or other colored light from electronic devices and turned upside down, the portrait causes even more confusion and uncertainty when viewed. The incessant flow of information is also personified by the author’s sound recording, which mixes the human voice with the sounds of messages and alerts that eventually take over the space completely, just as the laws of algorithms and social networks can usurp our attention.

The exhibition titled ZajtrajŠOK (play on Slovak words for tomorrow and shock) consists of paintings in the medium of painting by two contemporary Slovak artists Marek Jarotta and Miroslav Sandanus, it is a cross-section of several series of their work from recent years, which is ideologically related to both artists, their paintings communicate with each other. They deal with potentially apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic situations in the context of man and humanity, social problems on a global scale, natural disasters as a consequence of the ecological crisis, they depict traces of man referring to his presence.

Marek Jarotta is devoted to depicting architectural environments closely related to transport. In some of his series, these stations or airport halls are strangely, even atypically depopulated – as we usually never see them, because they are naturally accompanied by a constant daily hustle and bustle. In other works, different fragments of the aforementioned spaces are hybridly brought together. They are anonymous places of passage in which our perception is rather subconscious, we do not focus on the space around us, only some details catch our eye.

Miroslav Sandanus has long been involved in the ideological planes related to ecological topics. He works with the symbolism of change, purification or rebirth. He elaborates on the issue of the relationship between man and nature. With his works he draws attention to climate change, the ecological crisis, but also to the absurdity of an excessive consumerism lifestyle.

The collaboration between the two painters is based on the affinity between their work, in which they both deal with the relationship between environment and man, but there is also a parallel between their artistic destinies. Marek Jarotta, who is already an established artist but still belongs to the category of young artists in terms of age, received the VÚB Foundation’s Award for Young Artists shortly after completing his Master’s degree in 2013. Miroslav Sandanus has also recently started his artistic career with this award in 2020. Both painters were also awarded the Martin Benka Award in 2022.

Miroslav Sandanus in his painting practice thematizes an urgent social and environmental theme, reflecting the escalating ecological crisis caused by human activity, which has a negative impact on the environment, nature, landscape and the entire planet. It critically highlights its alarming state with the ever-increasing problem of climate change and global warming.

Sandanus’ landscapes mirror a present affected by human negligence, indifference and disinterest. In the artist’s work we can trace a certain development that is not linear, but rather has the character of parallel themes. A common thread running through the works is the effort to connect nature with man.

In the first line of his work, mainly connected with its beginnings (since 2017), the artist focuses on the depiction of landscapes polluted by the waste of civilization. He comments on visual smog, consumption, overproduction, the accumulation of material things – shopping, wasting – and thematizes illegal black dumps. The motif of the figure becomes an important part of it – a human being who has an ambivalent position. He is portrayed as a “destroyer” of nature and a “savior” at the same time. On the one hand, he criticizes him, on the other hand, he depicts him in an active effort to make amends (he collects waste), moralizes, enters his conscience and points to his ecological and social responsibility.

The second line of his work, which is also represented in the current exhibition, is characterized by painted landscapes without the presence of figures with a gloomy, melancholic, existential atmosphere. Abandoned, ruined and depopulated landscapes on the verge of an apocalyptic vision. In them, the author works with the symbolism of natural elements – fire, water – but also natural disasters – tornadoes, storms – or the destroyed nature and environment as a consequence of human behavior. Although the figure of man is absent in the works, the human trace is strongly legible even without his physical presence.

The author creates a kind of dramatic “theatre” scenes soaked in strong emotions. The sight of natural scenery depicting chaos, horror, nothingness, loneliness, emptiness evokes alternating feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, sadness or despair, as well as a sense of guilt stemming from inappropriate human intervention. The painter seems to transfer these human feelings to the “tormented” nature and de facto humanizes it. Thus, in the elemental scenes, a battle of “who against whom” takes place, the destructive power of man versus the indomitable (combative) power of nature.

The exhibition critically maps several thematic areas with environmental issues related to the disturbance of the natural balance, the threat to its stability resulting in its gradual disintegration.

In the free series Undefined (translatable as undetermined, unspecified), he thematizes one of the basic elements of nature – fire, which carries a lot of symbolism (from the first beginning through purification to rebirth). In the context of the artist’s work, it is more closely associated with climatic changes due to human activity, with the overheating of the planet, with drought, with the increasing heat that causes massive, uncontrollable fires that consume large areas of land, forests and fields. In his paintings, Sandanus depicts fire-stricken forests, as well as fragments of flames or the burn scar sites themselves. He depicts the motif from realistic recording to abstracted forms in whole and in detail, on a larger painting surface and in smaller/more intimate formats, while the size of the format does not determine the intensity of the feeling conveyed to the viewer.

His paintings, in which he thematizes air pollution, smog (with the eponymous title Smog), are dominated by a dynamic composition, reminiscent of an explosion, a gigantic whirlpool of air, which draws the viewer in, absorbs and “grinds” the viewer. In the context of art theory, outlined in the Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Briadotti and Maria Hlavajová, smog is assigned to four classical elements – earth, water, fire, air – as a modern phenomenon stemming from the consequences of the contemporary environmental crisis.

He takes a different approach in the more intimate images of hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms and lightning, whose velocity the author seems to have “stopped”, allowing us to observe them from a sufficiently “safe” distance.

The seemingly calm sea surface with floating and disintegrating ice floes depicted in his works named Disappearance and Disrepair (irreparable, irrecoverable) comments on climate change causing the dangerous gradual melting of glaciers.

The large-scale paintings Nothingness and Chaos depict ruined, devastated, lonely natural landscapes with broken trees or cut down forests. He also comments on the “mythical bark beetle”, often used as a pretext for logging – referring to the senseless and unnecessary export of timber.

In Oblivion (forgetting) and Inherency (presence), the artist records the interiors of abandoned houses in a phase of total desolation, which are falling apart without human care. Human homes become literal ruins with collapsing ceilings, fallen plaster and construction waste, resembling dumps or rubbish dumps left to their own existence. It is only a matter of time before they are swallowed up by nature. In the exhibition, these fragments of architecture, urban environments act as a contrast to the works thematizing nature explicitly, but the fact that their “lifespan” is defined and conditioned by human action remains common.

In his paintings, Sandanus not only records a gradually changing world with a clear critical ecological message, but the paintings of natural phenomena themselves – fire, smoke, smog, hurricane or glacier and sea level – also become visually interesting and attractive in their texture, matter, shape or color intensity.

Apathy is a state of insensitivity and lack of response. It can have a variety of causes, but often follows strong aversive stimuli over which we have no control. Helplessness in the face of overwhelming circumstances thus plunges us into indifference to them.

Apathy is also the title of a series of paintings by Miroslav Sandanus, which he has been working on continuously from 2017 to the present. Back then, he did not anticipate in what waves the danger of apathy would attack us, and the title may have seemed ridiculous at the time. Why should we be apathetic? But first the environmental crisis, then the pandemic and finally the war slowly crept up.

In his paintings, Miroslav Sandanus has captured the feelings of several members of the younger generation facing these gradually unfolding crises. He shifts the subject of man in nature, an almost classical genre of painting, to the present through his clothes and poses. He is someone with whom we can identify, for we are familiar with exactly the kind of sports jackets and tight trousers. The figures are often deliberately not looking directly into the face, averting their eyes or staring at the ground, their silhouette at times dissolving into their surroundings, at others glowing garishly.

The realistic painting gives the scene the feeling of an almost photographic slice of reality. In reality, however, Sandanus’ works are a combination of a record of real places and a sophisticated, subtle symbolic language. In the paintings, the figures are walking in a storm-ravaged forest, but the catastrophe is so close that we may not even understand that what we are looking at is a swath of uprooted trees. Also, a closer look at the romantic-looking cobwebs on the branches of the bushes reveals that they are trapped plastic bags.

Nature in his works is thus often invisibly urbanized, truncated or contaminated by human activity. The figures in his paintings know this, they confront it, but they cannot do much about it. They can do something to alleviate the symptoms, pick up litter, take precautions and take psycho-hygienic nature walks, but they cannot turn the tide of events such as climate change or pandemics.

To express this sense of imbalance and existential insecurity more consistently, the Apathy series is combined with several paintings from the Parallels series. In these, the human figures find themselves in a composition of dynamic movement, evoking a fall or fragmentation. They evoke a sense of vertigo and the threat of impending catastrophe of the collision of a fragile body with an unidentifiable smooth surface.

The feeling of being lost and powerless in the face of massive forces that exceed our ability to influence or even perceptually contain them in any way is materialized in contemporary philosophy in the form of the hyperobject, as defined by the British philosopher Timothy Morton. They are something that exceeds us in their scope and complexity. We cannot see them, we cannot understand them, but we feel that we are part of them. With this feeling, so new for a man who has inherited the modernist notion of the essentially total intelligibility of the world, we must now learn to live.

Miroslav Sandanus’ work is dedicated to landscape painting and new ways of depicting such a simple theme in a contemporary way. Thus, the content of his works does not portray the idyllic landscapes of the nineteenth century. On the contrary, the central motif of his works becomes images of ravaged nature. Burning flames engulfing the entire surface of the paintings, melting ice floes in endless space, or devastating dark storms sweeping every corner of the earth. These are scenes that shake each and every one of us. The commitment of his works cannot be unseen. After all, the subject of ecology is the daily bread of our contemporary society. But is it not possible to admire this unbridled power of nature to some extent? Is it not also possible to see the unobserved beauty of destruction? The author does not use any technical means to confuse us. There is no unbridled expression to be seen in his expression, which would outrage us, confuse us, and throw us into chaos or negative feelings. Rather, these are perfect depictions with harmonious composition. Even the color scheme corresponds to the actual reality and only emphasizes the possibility to contemplatively stand over the works and admire them. The beauty of destructive nature. What is the difference, then, between the beautiful landscapes of the nineteenth century and the “beautiful” landscapes of nature today?

The changing world became the main theme of Miroslav Sandanus’ master thesis. In his paintings, this theme appears through the metaphor of fire, which is today a well-known manifestation of climate change. However, it is also a sign of transformation, rebirth and in the story of Prometheus it mirrors the possible beginning of human civilization expansion. This is reflected in the hitherto dominant narrative of consumerism, which contains within itself the inescapable law of the transformation of goods into waste. Sandanus reflects on this narrative through the prism of a view of the landscape, altered by man, not only in the context of its impact, but also its transformation and the associated… In his painting practice, Miroslav Sandanus has long raised the question of the alteration of nature as a result of human activity. He has in the past thematized the overwhelming of the landscape with waste in a series of landfills, rubbish dumps as well as advertising spaces, which in a kaleidoscopic way captured the multiplicity of the production of goods and its promotion. He enhanced this impression with collage and assemblage entries that expanded the painterly language with fragments of real recycled mass production. In contrast to the concreteness of the waste, human beings in this landscape suffer from a kind of blurring; they are partial, anonymized, faceless. The oversaturation is subsequently flipped into the opposite position of scenes of atmospheric and dynamic natural phenomena and melancholic landscape still lives. However, they always contained a certain subversive element of pollution or destruction, which shifted the romantically attuned landscape into an ecologically critical context.

The changing world not only in the environmental but also in the social sense became the main theme of his master thesis. In it, he emphasizes the complexity of the issue, reflects on the causes of the status quo and looks for possible directions. However, the inseparable interconnectedness of man and nature can also be read into it. Landscapes marked by human activity change irreversibly and, ultimately, the change also has a retroactive effect on the original driver of events. We thus find ourselves in a landscape ravaged by the elements, which, despite its total destruction, bears some familiar features. It is our landscape, the one we have remade for ourselves, and which is now changing beyond our reach.

Sandanus also handles this theme through the metaphor of fire, which is a familiar manifestation of climate change today. In his canvases, however, it is not simply a simple depiction of wildfires; within the immaterial nature of this element, it moves from a realistic depiction of the landscape almost into abstraction. At the same time, however, he lets the symbolism associated with it take effect: fire is a sign of transformation, purification and rebirth. In the story of Prometheus, it also mirrors the possible origins of human civilization expansion. It thus brings us, imaginatively, to the beginning of the story of the modification of the world by human activity, which culminates in the Anthropocene.

This is reflected in the hitherto dominant narrative of consumerism, which contains within it the inescapable law of the transformation of goods into waste. Sandanus also considers this cycle as the main driver of the ecological crisis. From shopping carts, bags full of goods move in dark indeterminate spaces towards warehouses full of waste, and it is this act of accumulation that is important. It reveals our focus on the process of shopping, not only from the point of view of consumers, but of the whole economy, which is built on the concept of the constant growth of consumption. The aim thus seems to be to carry bags from the shops; the goods themselves are just a by-product of our cash flows. In doing so, he combines classical painting with dripping, the pouring and flowing of paint, or the sanding of individual layers.

The exhibition Changing World presents mostly new works by Miroslav Sandanus, which are complemented by several older works from the previous two years. They thus present a more comprehensive view of the artist’s work and his overall focus. Sandanus reflects on the present through the prism of looking at the landscape, changed by man not only in the context of the impact of his activities, but also in its transformation and the chaos associated with it. He thematizes not only the subject matter, but also the chosen perspectives and techniques used, on the fragmentation, opacity and contingency of the contemporary world. Although the ecological and climatic line of his works is strong, it is not the only determining one. It can be seen as a consequence, but he seeks a deeper cause. He uses multiple layers of symbols, associations and narrative to paint a larger picture of the problem. It could be said that his work follows to some extent the historical tradition of painting with a moral message – his concern is not only to point out, but also to influence the transformation of destructive patterns of individual and societal behavior.