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MIROSLAV HALAK
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MIROSLAV
HALAK
Simple vocabulary is not enough to explain what is happening in Ivan Pinkava’s photographs. Unfortunately, the foreign words that so often appear in texts about art have a tendency to deter the general public from reading them. Yet the use of technical terms should not be a pseudo-intellectual gesture, but rather an indispensable tool for describing phenomena that transcend the everyday. However, the search for the right expression to describe complex relationships within extraordinary compositions and visual puzzles can lead us on an adventurous journey through time and space—a journey of discovery. Ivan Pinkava’s exhibition Symploké / συμπλοκή also invites us on such a journey, for in our effort to penetrate beyond the surface layer of photographs of staged nude bodies, accumulated materials, or atypical tangles of objects, we transcend the categories of simple descriptions of beauty.
Tomáš Žemla’s works are a delicate materialization of modernist theories that inspire the artist to make bold artistic shifts. The result of these shifts is neither a meaningless abstraction of the object nor a symbol with an inexhaustible wealth of meanings, but rather the capture of a specific phase of objective reality within a network through which formal ballast falls away, leaving behind the aesthetic essence—and that is a rare catch.
Both Marek Ormandík and Jakub Špaňhel work within sociocultural conditions and stylistic intentions that certainly justify art historians’ use of the aforementioned nomenclature; yet at the same time, their work allows this terminology to be relativized...
The mutual perception of the three neighboring countries Austria - Czech Republic - Slovakia is a pars pro toto example of what such a dynamic in cultural exchange can look like on the basis of a geopolitical division.
