Sometime before, while working on another project I wrote that everything that is important in life is born, created as a result of serious, inevitable encounters – meetings of people, creators, events, impulses, experiences, approaches. The resulting work is then a meeting itself, an opportunity to meet in real space and time, but also outside of it. That is also the case of meeting (meetings) of two creative personalities – a painter and a photographer – to create joint works.
Marián Čižmárik and Robo Kočan met during Slow Light of Wavesproject, where Robo Kočan photographed the works of Marián Čižmárik. While working together they got to know each other, found they have lot of things in common and there was a process of enriching associations, which resulted in the creation of joint works. These works, which by some sort of layering, overflowing and leaking – totally in the spirit of Čižmárik’s sediments – are a wise dialogue of two creators with a tightly contoured image of the world.
Robo Kočan is brought to precisely compiled works by long-term conceptual reflection on the possibilities of photography, its classical practices and its expressive potential – as well as the polemic with the assumed origins and their active transformation. Aesthetically and contentwise impressive realizations arise as a result of research based focused on media itself – he refers experiments with light and accentuates the manipulative subtext of photographic image. A remarkable visual link to the photographic processes are also the photographs of Čižmárik’s objects, which the author attributed to materiality – matter, wood in its attractive form, color, metal and glass – in Kočan’s photographs transformed into light, space, energy, mystery – and here is highlighted their spiritual, symbolic dimension – that is Čižmárik’s wells, the energy, the flow that connects our presence with infinity, as well as Kočan’s Chergu Buga, the underworld spaces, intangible, intended only for an independent spiritual existence independent from time; it can be seen as a formally refined reflection of the principles of symbolic and metaphysical imagery.
And while Robo Kočan “paints” with light in his photographs, Marián Čižmárik interprets his creative platform through painting. His paintings clearly demonstrate the conviction that the physical act of painting is a situation where the artist can observe something essential about the determination and the freedom of a human being. On printed enlargements of Kočan’s photographs, which were based in his objects, he paints his layer, his sediment. Organic structures with penetrations into the long silence of colorful surfaces with the natural growth of their own peculiar forms, with a touch of energies or human intervention, become a space of the symbolic mystery of the cyclically repeating earthly birth, death, and subsequent resurrection.
November 2018 Karol Maliňák