Exhibition: Blažej Baláž: Conceptual texts

Type: Solo
Date: 2011/02/10
Duration: 2011/04/09
Gallery: Liptov Gallery of Peter Michal Bohun, Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia
Curator: Roman Gajdoš
WWW: www.galerialm.sk

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PRESS RELEASE:

Blažej Baláž: TREPTOMACHIA / VANITAS, 2011
155 x 545 cm, acryl, oil on canvas

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The Blažej Baláž’s (1958) artworks cover a wide field of the artistic language, one of the most expresive part is the position following the conceptual and post-conceptual tendencies.  A conceptual text (as is defined in the monograph Conceptual Text / Genesis and Metamorphosis writen by Roman Gajdoš) does not minimize the visual information to the pure content, but it is a medium itself, a message, code, grid and net transfering or catching certain meaning, this crucial point for the author is contrary to the dominance of images in the contemporary visual culture. The exhibition represents a limited number of strategies used by author himself since the end of 80s, which also bring into his artworks noticeable linking with the morphology of artistic texting.

When Blažej Baláž does not stretch the five meters wide canvas, the dominant of the exhibition (Treptomachia.Sk – Vanitas, 2011), on frame, he points out the ancient documents – the beginning of an alphanumeric linear code – as well as resignation to the clasical image on canvas, a certain type of skeptical attitude towards the thinking in images, which is deeply rooted in the classical conceptual thinking. The support of a textual circulation makes also the parallel to the cycles of life in general.

The horizontal conceptual texts bringing the sharper social context Umenie klamať, Umenie zabíjať, umenie kradnúť, Umenie prežiť (The Art of Killing, The Art of Lying, The Art of Stealing, The Art of Surviving, 2004/2005) lead our attention to the position of contemporary artist, and also, similar to the last Theoretical Texts with citations of art historians appropriated by Blažej Baláž, turn this message to the broader sociological and political connotations.

The simultaneous texts represent the specific position, which is created by the covering of textual layers. A sentence, in a meaning of the textual structure which is created from the signs arranged in space – in a relation what’s on the left and what’s on the right – and in time – what’s earlier and what’s later – is loosing its paradigmatic value and the relation between the upper and lower layer of the text becomes more important in context of the simultaneous texts. Also, the form after such a destruction, more than the textual attitude, points out a liquidness of the reading of images. In this exhibition Blažej Baláž presents one of his first text of this type (TOTOJEZIVOTPRESVINE, 2006/2007, THISISAPIGSLIFE), in which the irony and sarcasm in a definition of the temporary situation of artist and citizen has a noticeable place.

Blažej Baláž (born 1958 in Nevoľné, lives and works in Trnava, Slovakia)

Bibliography:

VALOCH, J. – VARTECKÁ, A. 2003. Blažej Baláž. Trnava : Trnava
university, East of Eden, 132 p.

BESKID, V. – GAJDOŠ, R. 2007. Blažej Baláž : TEXTS 1988 /2007.
Trnava : East of Eden, Trnava University, 50 p.

BALÁŽ, B. 2009. The Texts of the Texts. Trnava : Trnava University,
30 p.

GAJDOŠ, R. 2010. Conceptual texts. Trnava : Trnava University, 129 p.