Robo Kočan says he connects parallel worlds. He balances the noise of the city with the silence of nature, he casts doubt on reality through fiction, and draws light into darkness. He often travels, travelling around for meditation and the diversity of other countries and cultures, in order to add perceptions and emotions into his photographic images. He often materializes them into mysterious beings, angels or fairies, or composes portrait puzzles and collages showing that nothing in our life may be clear and objective. Almost thirty years have passed since the first solo exhibition of Robo Kočan and during this time he has built his uniquely playful experimental poetics, through which he tries to show things differently than they appear. For him, photography has never been an authoritative documentary tool, but a storyteller, a medium that can reveal the imperceptible layers of everyday life. Given the context and development of Kočan’s work, the exhibition in PistoriPalace may be a surprise. However, the intention was to step offof the expected ferry and show a slightly different Kočan than we are used to – the respective Kočan without luminographic experiments and colour filters, without shadows and collages, without visible post-production interventions. Instead of magical imagination we encounter particularly simple images that capture the (seemingly) ordinary things and cut-outs of the world – statues of saints stacked in depositories and corridors of galleries, banal urban still lifes, scarecrows in a eld, playgrounds buried under snow, architectural structures … Is Kočan leaving the fictional fantasy world? Does he exchangethe identity of a photographer-fine artist for the status of
a pure documentarist? The aesthetics of the collection forthe exhibition temps us to this interpretation; however, the Everydaynessis mundane only at first sight. The scarecrows in the eld are not only a typological series of odd DIY objects
to scare away birds, but through Kočan they transform intoa bizarre army of guardians. Neither are the polychrome sculptures only cast-off props. In Kočan’s composition the hands nailed to an imaginary cross transform into the clenched fists of revolutionaries and a bust in a bubble wrap is the Lady with the Veil in the author’s world. In this case reality is not bentby deliberate staging or artistic interventions, but by the most natural means – language. He attributes new names to objects and appearances, depriving them of their original functions
and turning them into characters from imaginative games.
He personifies the inanimate, he finds a photogenic form for everyday impressions. Literal descriptiveness is replaced by metaphor. For Kočan, this metaphorical world is perhaps an authentic reality; his reality, which, for a moment, can also be ours.
Michaela Pašteková
Curator