Boris Sirka (1981) is the most easily recognizable artist among young Slovak painters. His choice of genre and the options he keeps discovering and moving to new levels are the characteristic features of his artwork. In his works, he repeatedly processes “dark” topics inspired by literature or film, as well as by the urban legends of various places and cultures. Sirka is fascinated by horror, ghost and other scary stories, superstitions, and an entire range of sub-cultural motifs. He offers his interpretations of these for viewing in a highly aesthetic form, thus blurring the difference between the currently sagging levels of creativity around us and so-called “high art”. Like some other painters, he works in bounded and closed cycles. Any change in the program of Sirka’s work means a strict transfer from one phase to another, a sudden change in expression, new notions, and a new thematic field. He often borrows from the motifs of Japanese horror literature and cinematography, or adopts the atmosphere of a Victorian novel. At other times, he touches on Baroque still life painting in terms of the “vanitas” of human life. Currently, his focus is on the motif of a free-hanging drapery, which he processes in a minimalist way and with the absence of a figure or other object. He literally and simply “portrays” the draperies; that is, he paints them as autonomous items in a neutral space. Using this approach, obvious motifs and imagery of horror, eeriness and the frightening narrative disappear in favour of a subtler, darker, and less clearly depicted depth. The new Sirka pictures chillingly play with the human imagination, primary source of our un-nameable fear of an unseen world, only vaguely perceived by our senses.