Fero Lipták warns us from the very beginning that this concerns the word game, Meno, mesto, zviera, vec... (Name, city, animal, thing...) in which one player begins to recite the alphabet until another player says, “Stop!” Like every game, it has specific rules, but rules that are meant to be broken, and it seems that the artist really enjoys breaking them. His choice of paintings, drawings, and illustrations is a good example. His red man, so characteristic of his artistic style, barely makes an appearance here. Lipták escapes the predictability of the name to the motifs of the city. But his cities do not submit to the rules either. They are somehow excessive. As if they have gone mad in a compulsive movement of growth. More blocks, more floors, more tracts! This architecture of excess does not bypass even a figure. It transforms it into one of its urban zones, because the principle from which it grows is deeply human. Is it possible to break free from this city’s dictates?

Lipták tries to do so in his imagination, in the world of fantasy animals and things. Where stumps float in the air and hares take baths, perhaps we can be truly free. However, our enchantment is soon broken by the realization that the form of these surreal images is familiar to us after all. It willingly rotates around the gravitational center of the name. The game demands obedience. Unless...

The artist invents himself again to wink at us conspiratorially and remind us that the charm of the game lies primarily in its imperfection. The three dots here open up a space that we barely remember. A pre-normative space, when we were more of a quality than a name. The tiny shapes of buildings, animals, and things in his naive drawings are just clawing their way out of non-existence. As if someone was just learning how to handle a pencil. As if we were rediscovering the world. A... Stop! (ψ)!