Eva Rotreklová: unexpected meanings in places like reality TV

As part of our editorial column, we have decided to present creative personalities who inspire us and whose work we would love to explore more closely through conversation. Our interviews always revolve around people and topics that genuinely matter to us, culturally, visually, and professionally. We are starting with Eva Rotreklová, whose work we know primarily from Prague's UMPRUM, our alma mater, where her diploma thesis on mascots and iconic symbols first caught our attention. It touches on something we deal with regularly ourselves. Her approach and visual language are precisely why we reached out.

Eva Rotreklová is a Czech visual artist and a graphic designer, based in Prague, whose work crosses art and design with an effortless fluidity. Drawing is her thing. Whether it's screen prints, art books, digital work, or video, she finds endless ways to play around with it. Her work has a sharp edge but never takes itself too seriously, mixing critical thinking with genuine humor. Eva digs into the pop culture, exploring how the content we consume (celebrity gossip, social media feeds, corporate branding) shapes the way we perceive relationships, identity, and what becomes part of our memory. She has a talent for finding unexpected meanings in places like reality TV, TikTok, and design of a mascot – the kind of spaces that might seem superficial at first glance but actually reveal a lot about how we live these days. Her work feels both smart and accessible, speaking directly to anyone scrolling through the same chaotic digital world she's referring to.

Why did you decide to focus on the phenomenon of mascots?

E. R.    It started quite naturally because I've been doing figurative drawing for a long time and I create characters. I give these characters various values and humanize them. Originally I was interested in learning how to draw mascots but later I found out that it's pretty simple, so there isn't much space for learning. At the same time that simplification is, in my opinion, a road to hell that I don't want to take. I was interested in how they are created in terms of drawing but also, for example, how cuteness works practically. All of this kept building up. Slowly it turned out that there is some potential for a deeper – even more conceptual research so I dived into it. 

What do you think about the integration of artificial intelligence into the advertising world of mascots? AI seems to me to be flattening mascots these days. It's just creating noise “or a facade.”

E. R.    Recently I saw some mascots for betting offices and casinos. Their mascots lacked any form of character, which is essential. Usually when someone generates a mascot with artificial intelligence, what happens is that it's just a character that points and attracts attention, but doesn't have any significant attributes or a value. So the way it's processed is actually quite random. I encountered these often during the work on my thesis, but I tried to avoid them from the very beginning.

E. R.    Thanks to that, the publication became such a retro book. Mascots have disappeared for quite a bit, but now they're reappearing so I'm also observing something like a “boom era” of mascots. The ones that are visible in my work are mostly older and there is a certain form of nostalgia or a memory that relates to them.

The role of the mascot as an antagonist is also interesting. That is actually also my Mr. Moralist, who mainly criticizes other mascots. He himself is a mascot too, but he has no form – he's just a kinetic skeleton that isn't finished. That’s why Mr. Moralist has the privilege to criticize all the others. An interesting fact is that mascots with bad behavior or a character often evoke more emotions and are able to establish a deeper relationship with the client, unlike those who are just cute.

E. R.    Kawaii aesthetics is also very specific and I had to mention it in my work, but content-wise I didn't consider it much in the research. Mainly because as people of Western culture we perceive mascots differently. We see them as an aesthetic form of manipulation and connection with a client. To us they aren't as connected to culture and therefore this approach isn't very familiar to us. Whereas East Asian mascots are much more complicated – you could say they are explicitly taken as a cultural code that we can hardly ever understand.

According to what criteria did you sort the mascots?

E. R.    That was probably the hardest part of the whole work for me because there were countless keys by which to sort them. The output of the work was not supposed to be a mascot catalog, and I especially didn't want to give the impression that I wanted to educate anyone in this area – honestly it was the opposite of a useful design. But I told myself that since I already have collected them. I should at least name them and write down the date they were created, but in the end I decided to present them differently. I presented them as Mr. Moralist meets them during the day. Precisely, at what time he can encounter which mascots outside. It starts with breakfast – cereals, that's for example one category, then he drives to work by car – those are again mascots connected with speed, cars or car washes, and this way we get to the evening when it's teeth, toothpastes and so on.

In this process I could filter which mascots to mention and which not, because I wanted to avoid, for example, mascots oriented towards sports. Sports mascots are a slightly different category – they don't explicitly attack our attention like advertising mascots. Usually they already have some fans. Sports mascots emerge over time, whereas a mascot for a product is born right at the beginning of a brand.

Which mascot stuck with you the most personally and brings you this nostalgic experience?

E. R.    As a child, I watched a lot of commercials. I remember that I explicitly wanted only products with mascots. In this case, I remember that the first one that really stuck with me was Perla (vegetable margarine – a butter substitute), which I wanted to buy even though I didn't like the taste – it was actually pretty awful, but the mascot had some strange power over me.

When you were collecting visual material over the years, could you say in which sector mascots appear the most and where rarely or not at all?

E. R.    I noticed that mascots are present in sectors where the competition is high. There are many more of them there than in sectors with a low competition, or when companies try to look serious. I didn't ask myself the question "Why are there mascots missing somewhere?" – because in my opinion every institution can have a mascot, as it is in Japan, for example.

What was the most controversial mascot you came across?

E. R.    I came across these old advertisements that were targeted at children (the youngest customers) at Burger King specifically. The mascot had this bizarre sexual undertone, which is also why I created a category where mascots are even behind the bars – in the book.

(Eva flips pages of her book about mascots to show us.)

E. R.    When I was looking for some interesting mascots in London, I would be finding them in the streets, but in grocery stores it's forbidden to target children. So you can see just empty boxes with text and a lot of empty space for graphics without mascots.

Would you say that certain archetypes do exist among them?

E. R.    I read through various studies on how they should be drawn so that it would work and they would properly attract the client. And that's where I understood that some things repeat. For example, the size of the mascot is important – it can't be too long to remain sufficiently cute. It must have human-like limbs, anthropomorphized, or should be directly connected with some animal to have a deeper meaning or significance. For example, fluffier mascots resembling a rabbit are usually associated with laundry and household cleaning products. Whereas in contrast, Alza – the alien (mascot for a store with electronics) is intentionally shiny to go with electronics, so even the surface of a mascot usually matches the product that it promotes. Also, limbs are often quite important, especially when you need the mascot to point at something or be "in action." Limbs are drawn to make them look more dynamic. After a longer time of doing my research, I started to see the same repeating mascot over and over again. Even though they differ in details, after some time they start to merge together because in the end they all look very similar.

As you mentioned before, your mascot Mr. Moralist – whom you created yourself to guide readers – has no form and evokes a shadow or a silhouette assembled from fragments. Why does he look like that and what critique can we hear from him in the book?

E. R.    The form of Mr. Moralist was very much inspired by Matěj – my boyfriend, a 3D designer. He also works with characters or figures. In 3D programs, the character looks just like a skeleton before anyone designs it. Most people nowadays create mascots directly in 3D because it's probably easier than drawing them. So that inspired me. It's actually a stripped-down skeleton that isn't finished at all and you have no idea what he will look like. In the book, his role is to introduce us to the topic. You could say he's supposed to open our eyes. Mascots evoke emotions in us, both positive and negative, and they carry so much of our memory. When a brand doesn't have a character, it's simply forgettable.

E. R.    I would say that in some cases they function as unconscious actors of aggression. The book about mascots that I’ve created is designed to feel like an hour-long scroll on TikTok. It should actually make us feel sick. When we go for a walk down the street and encounter several mascots in a short time, even if we don't pay much attention to them, they still attack our subconscious and that’s also where they often remain.

I found myself in a conflicted position because I like mascots and I'm happy when someone creates them. That's why Mr. Moralist might also be jealous of some mascots because he himself isn't finished and doesn't look like one of them. That's precisely why he starts criticizing them. I describe him as an outsider who is murmuring often...maybe his hair is falling out – he feels no joy at all and no one wants to transform him into that real mascot anymore, but he constantly stumbles upon them day after day. There is nothing left to do for him but to criticize the other mascots. Which is justifiable, but at the same time there's this personal grievance of his.

Did you also think about a different form for Mr. Moralist?

E. R.    Of course! I really wanted to create a great mascot so that I could present how good I am at it, so that I could only focus on creating mascots in the future. (Eva is smiling) But this idea didn't align with the concept at all. I would be contradicting myself and he – Mr. Moralist - would never be as good as the others in the book. So as the narrator of the book, I had to create someone who wouldn't be of the same rank as the other mascots so he could judge them. I thought a lot about the form of drawing – something in the vector style. I have some old sketches of what he was supposed to look like before, but in the end I couldn't use them. Otherwise, the third part of the book is about deconstructing the mascots. That was my main creative input. It was about black parts, fragments/silhouettes of mascots – from which a series of posters has been created. I don't pride myself in creating books. As I mentioned before, my main focus was on drawing but unfortunately there wasn't much space in that area creatively because ultimately, I prioritized the concept.