Ernest Zmeták was involved in painting an also in graphic, drawing, and monumental production. His resources became the honor to internal lawfulness of things, and disability of constructional geometrical foundation of presented motif.
The repertory of motives of his work was not very large-scale: land painting, portraits and self-portraits, still-life; in graphic it was folk ballads and biblical scenes. He was looking for permanence and principles in a form: he proved to put tension and gesture into seemingly static things and situations. Next, he proved to bring life into things with its rugged gesture, while the main emphasis of his manifestation was built on visualization and appearance of the character of a form. He designed the forms on the surface practically in a sculptural way. He also "carved" the forms with shortened and in the same time with pictorially and colorful delicate artistic language.
New personal feature appeared in Zmeták's work at the turn of 1960's and 1970's. This new feature was related to the application of flat and simplified articulation, which fulfilled his paintings with more outstanding and naïve spirit. His primitivism was purposeful and thought-out to the last detail.
The huge passion of Ernest Zmeták was traveling. Except of Slovakia (Orava, Gemer, Červený Kameň, Košice), he was interested in other countries. His all-life creative love was Italy, where he took a studying trip in 1947. Since then, he traveled and painted there in cyclical intervals.
The sensitive concern connected with nostalgic and melancholic lyricism and matter of poetization was more evident in his late works. Also colorful vision in his work was touched by changes: from dark and sonorous colors with local tones represented as an effort to touch real hue of features and things, through his full-colorful and hedonic lighting up to inner and transcendental backlighting.
"The closed work of Ernest Zmeták is among other things an example of his perception of fear of potential western-European -isms and their passing inspirational vacuum, which Zmeták found himself at the beginning of the personal pictorially and able effort. The documented example of this feeling was shared by the author, who got to know western-European modernism. Among other generational artists, Zmeták gained this feeling by his own experience. All of this came to spochybnenie of the modernistic dogma by the side of Zmeták because of his different opinion which differed from the opinion of other figures of painting in 1940's. His opinion was not to find compromise in the style of return to "proved" premodernistic tradition, but his idea was about positivism: to keep the character of a modern painting form, while making the stubborn effort to get over the cliché of the style; and with this purposeful effort to revaluate their already given approach of meaningful statement. Rigt in this we could find hidden motivation of Zmeták's painting and the main reason of the visual overhang of his program out of generational opinioned stereotypes in the same time." Ján Abelovský, 2010
By citing the famous sentence from The private letters between Fulla and Galanda we could say that Zmeták's painting was similar to the reality, but especially to the painting… By knowing that the words can simplify everything, it has to be said that Zmeták in his "ars-poetics" directed himself from reality to poetry, from analysis to synthesis, from physics to metaphysics, from temporal to supernatural …