Blažej Baláž belongs to the generation of artists who introduced the then foregrounding form of post-modern art to Czechoslovak art. The Slovak theoretists rather conscientiously reflected his work and they still do, but it was only one certain aspect. At first I wondered why it was like that but in recent years - after deeper consideration - I begin to understand. His work is inwardly entirely coherent, its particular forms are mutually complementary and "fit with one another" like the two halves of a zip do... His works are full of messages and connotations and are an affluent source for a more complex analysis. Moreover some relate to the classic media - painting and graphic arts, others apply means and forms of work that were first systematised in the sixties - actions, installations or the not traditional category of accumulation invented in the circle of the "new realism"... It is therefore rather difficult to find a common aegis that wouldn't be too simplifying and would comply with our intention to reflect the author's effort without any simplification... It is easier with the majority of artists: those who open certain problems connected with the beginnings of late modernism, solve problems of mostly analytical character and are deeply concentrated on a clearly defined phenomenon (example: various denominations of monochrome painting) that deserves detailed analytical studying that can be followed in theoretical interpretations. Though the post-modernists often "change masks", always in harmony with "the spirit of the period", they freely play with certain phenomena and this freedom of theirs doesn't require a complicated analysis, it can often be summarised in an aphoristic playful (sometimes superficial) way... The few authors who connect the changing of media and the context of statements with the complex structures of esthetic and semantic correlations are unlucky as it is difficult to comprise this polymorphism and poly-functionalism in a linear text. In this Blažej Baláž ranks first among the Slovak artists though we certainly could find a comparable example in the Czech milieu (probably in the personality of Jiří Kovanda).
 

Baláž is certainly an artist who requires for himself the prefix post – of course only before our preferring the characteristic post-conceptual to the already faded expression post-modern. Whether we like it or not we all live in the post-modern era but programmed post-modernism was the last of the late modernisms with their more or less clearly defined programmes and the militant refusal of everything else. Post-conceptual reminds us of the importance of conceptual thinking in the second half of the sixties. At first in the analytical rigid forms of their founders who reached the possible maximum of reduction in the linguistic formulation of a relation. At the same time conceptual works came into being whose authors were unwilling to give up their materials of esthetic values and meanings. At the beginning of the seventies the analytical or fundamental painting led to the transposition of conceptual thinking to the media of painting and drawing. Many postmodern returns to subjective painting or sculpture didn't avoid respecting a certain "concept" though in different relations of meanings. The real "post-modern period" is already open to all approaches, all are equivalent as all of them are of the same (equally little) validity. What remains is what has always been essential - the authenticity of the contribution and the uniqueness of the artist... All of us are in this situation. For Blažej Baláž it means that he refers to some approaches characteristic for conceptual thinking but refuses to regard them as absolute in their particular spheres of communication and above all the social context becomes part of his message. Not in its original form as we often witness today but in an inwardly structured polymorphic statement in which the reflection of the social context is one of the levels of his message.  He is linked with the sphere of conceptual art (in its various denominations) by his evoking and surveying certain relations, the necessity of the work's reflection in the viewer's mind and emphasising the meaning, whether mediated by verbal elements or otherwise by precisely identifiable ones. It is interesting that the author's starting point was painting with all its meanings and the aura we have been attributing to it for centuries. This has been repeatedly confirmed by many authors - in part of his works by Baláž himself! Painting in our Euro-American cultural context is linked with so many different social and esthetic values that a new articulation and a new "justification" of its existence can always be found.
 

Baláž's link with the post-modern programme of the day can be characterised as his Lehr- und Wanderjahre. Only later his programme became really individual, the forming of his own unique message meant more for him than joining common collective efforts. Post-modern lessons allowed him to vary freely the used media naturally always in harmony with their optimal application. His conceptual experience led to his work with the language and with objects of precisely definable meaning. It may be symptomatic that his graphic print The Mechanical Paradise, 1988-1990 can be perceived as the climax of his post-modern efforts and is marking his new individual way. Out of the archetypic figural  sign, maybe a reference to the idols of remote cultures, grow ever smaller identical figures, the artist gets into the complicated system of relations and coherences beginning with the year of his birth on the forehead, across various generally understandable signs to verbalised reflexions in Slovak and English. It is also interesting that he tried to give the graphic print a so far not traditional monumental format of 200x140 cm (!) – an obvious ambition to make it communicate as a picture. Most substantial is its polysemantics, the complexity of the whole that one can never fully  perceive while always being aware of other details and their messages. Emphasis on the incorporation of language and texts is an important aspect of the artist´s further work: in which verbalised meanings become autonomous parts. Naturally they are not deprived of further modifications of meaning brought about by the ways in which they are visualised. One of the relations the artist presents is the relation of the reduction to a verbalised creation in the classic conceptual art. His problem is to relate verbal meanings to a world beyond the world of art, beyond his "ivory tower". In his drawings (also in monumental format) the relation to this world is reflected by introducing humorous and ironical figural details (Black drawing 1 - 3. Portrait 1 - 3, Encyclopaedia 1 - 4, all in 1990) that "comment" the artistic autonomy of the work. The themes of  mostly monumental pictures and prints gradually become isolated words often neologisms precisely reflecting the changed situation in recent art and society. Neither the philosophy of the language of Wittgestein provenience nor the Kossuth endeavour to substitute philosophy by art serve  as inspiration and starting points. We are at the beginning of the nineties and we are in Slovakia. We cannot forget that the artist who had to cope with a lot of difficulties under the former regime is now more and more disappointed by the development in politics and by those who exert them. In 1993 he creates and exhibits one of his large pictures made of one word - the neologism POLETIKA - as if in politics ethics should prevail, or on the contrary as if ethics deformed politics... How is it in fact? This embodied inquiring is presented by the assemblage of various little textile pieces introducing further not verbalised meanings to the work. Maybe the first of these text pictures wanted to report on newly opened possibilities of communication, about the possibility to be free to make one's own message public: M+B, 1991 we still perceive as a private reference, the relation Maria and Blažej is sufficient to be the theme of the work, or that ART, 1991/1992 can be the pure tautology of the picture, formerly we would have looked for gentle irony in a really monumental format of such personal statements. But for Baláž post conceptual also means post communist, here and now, in the place where he lives. With this he anticipated the wave of socially referring art that was gradually spreading in the world of art since the nineties. But Baláž remains anchored in the sphere of conceptual thinking more pregnantly than most of so oriented art is and above all  that his message to the social reality contains a critical or ironic pang while the majority of its world protagonists in reality "only report".
 

By the way the artist, in harmony with the changed post-conceptual situation, can and in fact has to change his strategy part of which is the varying of the media, he also refers to different phenomena that were, in the classic avant garde and late modernism, unconditionally linked up with a certain type of the author's statement and were perceived as the "handwriting" of a certain artist. The phenomenon of accumulation was a logic development of the line at the beginning of which was the initiating gesture of Marcel Duchamp - significant for us because it themed the transposition of a chosen object from the banal, profane, non artistic world to the world of art with its aura and transcendency. The linking of the pure materialisation of the work of art with the pure conceptual reflexion was also essential. Since that time many artists have used the principle of a found object, at the beginning of the 60ies they were joined in Paris by the protagonists of the "new realism" from which several methods were deduced. One of them, of the most general validity, was the accumulation of objects of the same kind and name, originating from the sphere "beyond the world of art". Accumulation in relation to Baláž's work is one of the modernistic strategies he reflected and further developed in an original way in his new concept in the 90ies. If his traditional prints from the end of the 80-ies, full of figural and verbal information, are not yet a response to accumulation, the serial ordering of indentical human figures in the following drawings (Portrait 1 - 3, Encyclopaedia 1 - 4, all in 1990) certainly are. In them the artist started his way to the accumulation of materials... The method of filing coins and further operations of their remains represent an extremely minimalised form. They were connected with the timely preceding series of coin graphic but were in their basic technology similar to the large installations in situ at exhibitions at which the artist worked with textile cuttings, small rags that, no more in their original form of a piece of clothing, completely lost their value. But when they were used to form a work of art, they again acquired a certain value - an artistic value. This is the paradox Blažej Baláž has developed in all types of his work with coins... He wound up a kind of strings of textile pieces and used them in some of his pictures of linearly formed, radically enlarged figural details that are due to their "transcription" to the rag line, morphologically and dimensionally shifted quotations of details of classical figural drawings (the connection with Warhol's persiflage in the title One is better than thirty, 1992) or with his verbal coalescences. A kind of accumulation are also the newly organised textile cuttings as the organisation of elements of a certain language, using the verbal material of various language contexts in the same way as in his textile lines of pieces of various provenience, he joined several languages or discovered "hidden" meanings in some of their words (Democrazy, 1991, Hrobonjour, 1992, Svetlovec, 1992, Poletika, 1993...). It was also possible to leave pieces of textiles free and work with them in a certain place. The result were transient works reacting to the concrete space and the amalgamation of the pure esthetic qualities of the colours and forms, connotations, the significance of the chosen place and the artist's own verbal interpretation by naming them. Kolo, kolo mlýnske, za štyri rýnske..., 1992 on the floor of the Trnava gallery metaphorically associates the part of the song which is no more in its title but kept in people's memories. The theme is the relation between the circle as a geometrical order and its impairing by materials that can be easily manipulated and changed. The artist coped with the phenomenon window at two exhibitions: in Trnava and in Bratislava - each time in a different way. The window is something that makes it possible to see from inside out but also from outside inside. It is something that connects the inside and the outside in a formation existencially connected with the man. The window is often the most expressive characteristics of the place where we can live or at least spend some time. The archetype of the window must have been formed gradually in the human culture since the time the man started to build artificial dwellings even if archeological findings haven't proved it... Baláž dealt with the meaningfulness of the window and also with the possibility of filling it up and maybe hide something in it. The Trnava installation with the "accumulation" in the title VÝK/HLAD (in Slovak the combination of the words shopwindow and hunger) presented another function of the window and, somehow ironically reported about it by accumulated pieces of textiles piled up in the window while the top part of it remained empty so that it was possible to see out and in. In further installations - in the MAB Gallery in Trenčín, 1993, in the Gallery of the Town Bratislava, 1993, and in Trnava (within the frame of the exhibition Good day, Mrs Koppel, 1997), the windows were filled up in various ways but completely. It was a radical entry into conventions usually connected with our using the window and comprised also questions about the existential definition of the man, his figure and presence as well as the artist´s important conviction that impaired communication enables man to reach deeper insight surpassing our usual conventions. The installation in the Gallery of the Town Bratislava added a new meaning to the iconography of Baláž's installations. In the similar way as he worked with isolated pictorial or text quotations in some of his pictures, he substituted the cuttings of small rags by cuttings of old art journals (connected with the ideologically determined art) and did so in the institution closely connected with the presentation of original works and was significant to everybody who dealt with fine art in Slovakia (and not only there). He joined the political post-communist gesture with the gesture of the post-modern: everything the visitors thought to be certain was discredited and transformed to cuttings on which one could recognise the nature of the particular pieces of information but that were "hit" to such an extent that the details became valueless. It was a critical reflexion of a certain phenomenon by means of constitutive creative art. It was the artist's questioning the nature of the relation - value and no value - and the possibility to transform the valueless into a work of art. But again meant for a certain place and therefore transient... We can perceive all the accumulations in the windows as esthetically beautiful pictures, as the transformation of the banal cuttings into visually attractive structures known from some spheres of modernistic art. These are the various levels of messages and relations the artist - as it is said today - sophistically works with.
 

The relation of Blažej Baláž to graphic art is remarkable. He studied under Vladimír Gažovič, one of those who in the Czechoslovak milieu (Jiří Anderle in Prague, Albín Prunovský in Bratislava) brought graphic art to maximal mannerism that used metaphoric figurative themes in the esthetic evaluation of subordinate partial structures. Looking at Baláž's early prints we see that this kind of work was attractive to him. Part of his new post-conceptual thinking was also denying: he didn't deny graphic art as a phenomenon that would be understandable as it is a category in which not many innovations can be found in the last two decades (except for specific computer graphics). He denied graphic art in the form that was closest to him at the beginning and by doing this he found a new approach to it. We could characterise this approach by different names. At the turn of the 50-ies and 60-ies Vladimír Boudník evoke great interest in his younger friends from the groups of "Confrontations" in Prague and Bratislava by his "active" and "structural" graphics that were  pioneer expressions of the Czechoslovak informel. Materialness (traces of tools used in a factory) and natural phenomena (magnetic graphics) were used within the frame of pure abstraction. In the 60-ies it was Alena Kučerová who, in the context of a "new sensibility" reacted to the specific possibilities of the graphic matrix, at first by bent parts of a metal board - the matrix - with perforated points that formed various structures and in the end simple lines. In the 70-ies Adriena Šimotová modified some aspects of conceptual thinking into the form of direct meaningful operations of the matrix such as the form of a human head or parts of a figure. I'm not mentioning this by chance as I think that what Baláž did in the 90ies is a further original development of problems we connect with these personalities. Schematically and essentially simply: the use of found structures, most often coins, can be regarded as the continuation of Boudník's line of material graphics, by giving up individual handwriting and serial ordering he is close to Kučerová, new meanings and free work on the plane of the print links him to Šimotová. All this is connected with distance and polysemantics brought by post-modern feeling. In our context his graphic prints are one of the few forms of graphic art in which current events are rendered... The majority of them were made in the years 1992 and 1993, they are imprints of accumulations and minting of found coins. The use of something that is beyond the world of art acquired a new and semantically exposed meaning. We can but guess whether a deep impulse was the fact that the artist studied at the Secondary School of Applied Arts in Kremnica, the town known to everyone in Czechoslovakia by the minting of coins one always pays with. Baláž upvalues the coins by creating of them his print of a worthy format and therefore of a certain pictorial ambition. It is similar to the worthless small rags but with an important difference because coins are part of the sphere of money which, after the political changes in our country, became a kind of only divinity for many people. The contrast of the white plane with the imprints of letters is highly esthetic in Baláž's prints - his letters are not without any indication as the conceptualists of the first guard would have presented. Baláž continues in modifying the text, mostly of one word only, semantically or sometimes combining fragments of quotations from his older prints and by lines of capital letters created by coins. They are found objects, the matrixes represent the "language of graphic art" Baláž parted with a few years ago and the coins express his message to the world of pecuniary values. He interprets them visually as an esthetic quality and re-evaluates their meanings, even of such basic things as life (LIFE) and human existence (TO BE, IDEATH) are and also the classic conceptualistic tautologies of the realised work (PRINT). In his mixing meanings of various hierarchic levels we again find Baláž´s postconceptual localisation of his efforts.
 

His problems are articulated with the same pregnancy in the following complex of works mostly connected with the meaning of coins as means of payment but relating to the phenomenon of painting. We might say that his graphic prints are treacherous pictures - at first sight beautiful clear geometrical forms on classic handmade paper, after closer observation contamination of the beautiful paper by something profane - coins, metal money. Many of Baláž's pictures are even more treacherous: at first it looks as if the artist were interested in the possibilities that are still tolerable in the analytical probing of late modernism. It may seem that he belongs to those who found in monochromy one of the not yet discovered sub-chapters (they do exist and the discovery of them is part of the complex structure of semantic and esthetic influences of these artefacts). In reality his intention is quite different: he examines neither the esthetic and communicative possibilities of some pictures created by the "accumulation" of a glittering powder nor the interactions we see when the monochrome plane of a certain colour is covered with this powder. Baláž subordinates all this to the concept of a message beyond the autonomy of the world of art in the possibly most directive form. He collected (maybe originally for his prints) coins of various values from different currencies. The coinage determines the real "cost" of the coin but Baláž removes this coinage with slow  and patient handwork. It is very similar to the minimalistic body demonstrations we admired in some creators of body art at the beginning of the 70ies. Baláž demonstrates his action by photographs or by the video, the tape recording of the sound component of the action sometimes resounds as a seemingly minimalistic music in his exhibitions. It is and is not minimal music, it is and is not body art, they are references to these fields of art but "burdened" with new meanings. In the same way as are "burdened" his references to the late modernistic abstract painting. Monochromy is an independent chapter in the history of modern art, characterised by the consideration of the picture as an absolutely independent quality with no other relations. We can also say - the top of the ivory tower that needn't be (still is or already is) meant pejoratively. It is no more a path for Baláž to follow with his individual experience and the recollections of the whole modern and post-modern art on his mind. He often creates his pictures on a square format codified for the classic abstract modernism... They are created by layers of metal powder the artist filed of the material most remote from art - of coins, of money. Or was this the theme of something that other artists hides - that he wants to make beautiful pictures but that in this world art values can only be expressed in the term of money? He named one cycle The Second Skin, 1949-2000, the largest not yet finished cycle is named Mandalas. Is it extreme irony or the question whether something originating in the pecunial sphere can, by hard work and esthetic efforts,  bring people calmness and peace in the end? It is art that tries to reflect the "world we live in" and part of which is much uncertainty and absurdity. In the cycle the Hidden Charm of the Colour, 2001, he most directly evaluates the correlation with pure monochromy - a certain colour is covered by glittering metal powder not only on the plane but also on the sides of the picture. Both levels create a complementary entirety and the question is what exactly is the hidden charm? Is it at the top or on the side? Isn't the hidden thing covered by something even more charming than the chosen colour is? Baláž created mandalas of complementary meanings - in fact unstructured monochromes - out of waste amassed in his studio and of poppy seeds. The waste is the depiction of valuelassness, it is something that has a lot of negative connotations, something we don't expect anything from, something we should throw away... But if a picture is created of waste it becomes a certain socially acknowledged value. Such a gesture can't be repeated too often but it complemented well the artist's series in which he examined the nature of values in the society. The choice of poppy seeds for the Mandalas 5 and 15 is semantically and esthetically ambiguous. By creating the beautiful bluish picture the artist's attention turned to an other phenomenon - the live seeds. Something that can be sewn, that can grow and yield crops. Moreover his questioning is connected with a certain cultural and historical context. It is said that poppy seeds are known and appreciated as cultivated plants only in Central Europe. The general meaning of the seed is anchored in the environment the artist comes from. This fact can be further developed by the material of the ground - in the Mandalas 7 and 13 it is embroidered linen that belonged to his mother. The artist's close relation to his family becomes part of the play and is connected with the home context. In the same way as some of his text pictures the Mandalas 7 and 13 reflect the artist's ambivalent relation to "his" Slovakia. Maybe also to his childhood...
 

Filed coins can appear in pictures in two complementary forms: either as glittering metal powder created by the artist's physical action or as metal wheels created during the realisation of the action. In both forms they have their place in the text pictures - the second component of the artist's work in recent years. We perceive their mutual appurtanance due to their appearance in the pictures in both components, both forms of coins that went through Baláž's metamorphosis. They are "two forms of one coin" and can function in the new artificial context of the work of art. As if the artist accentuated this appurtenance by using both "remains" in various text pictures. The triptych Geld macht frei (Money makes people free), 2001 is probably the most radical picture in which filings of coins are the only material. At first sight we are aware of the fact that Baláž paraphrases the slogan Arbeit macht frei (Work makes people free) that was written above the entrance to the nazi concentration camps. Hard work in them did not bring any freedom, maybe in heaven if one believed in it. Today we live in a society to whom money became a divinity, the letters the artist used remind us of nazi Germany but with the shifting of the meaning he approaches the present. What is the present time like? This is the question he puts to himself and to us in this keynote theme so important for many of us. Do we really have the possibility of a choice? What makes us free? This was the name of his exhibition in the Vojtech Löffler Museum in Košice in the year 2001. For him it is the essential theme in relation to the social function of art and to his approach to the world of art and to the world we live in. There is more playfulness and irony in the title of his further significant exhibition in the Ján Koniarek Gallery in the summer 2003: Geld mach Kunst (Money makes art). This could be pure conceptual tautology as the larger part of the exhibited artefacts was really created of money, of coins either out of its dust or of tiny smoothed metal pieces.
 

It is the connection of the metamorphosis of money into works of art and a whole scale of questions from very serious ones to some ironical or even playful ones... Baláž doesn't renounce his keynote theme, he develops it on a broad scale beginning with the contradiction of the "powdered" (i.e. covered with filings of money) and the "unpowdered" colours (Memory 1 - 3, 1997 - 2000), the substitution of the metal powder by poppy seeds and the confrontation of both materials (in the series Mandala) to new variants of text pictures. The last mentioned are anchored in the sphere Baláž has been engaged in recently but with more irony and self-irony, reflection and self-reflection. The result are texts in a mixture of Slovak and English – a persiflage of the barbarous mixing of these languages in advertisements and speaking in the Slovak and Czech milieu.
 

The picture Moneynom with engraved lines of black monochrome was dominant in this exhibition. The combination of the English "money" and the Czeck "jenom" (only) resulted in the coalescence of graphemes, and a "Baláž" accumulation that inseparably connected the two languages. New intended meanings arise from this coalescence, this time EYE and short words (ON, NO, MON, NOM) and their allusions in various languages. Baláž sometimes transforms codified sequences and expressions - GODSAVEUS... Why should God save just the queen or the king, he should save also us, shouldn't he?
 

The artist likes to divide the text of nine graphemes into three sequences that bring a new artificial order into the original sense (PER/IFE/RIA - written in reality from below backwards, or HAP/PIN/ESS). At first sight - and not only at first sight as we perceive the new order as new information that is adequate to other ways of articulation of a work of art - the real semantic is hidden and substituted by the play with the language... Another example: WET/RUST/TIN is playing with various ways of reading and the expectation whether we will identify the initial sense...
 

In the same way as Baláž discovered new possibilities of re-evaluating some classic phenomena of late modernism in fine art - above all the method of accumulation and the monochrome as the most radical possibility in painting and brought into it his social import - he works with the language on the background of his experience of conceptual art and concrete poetry. He refers to them, expects our experience of perceiving these phenomena and then substitutes their strict analysis by  his own playfulness connected with his post-modern situation and his finding a new type of artistic messages. Work with the language is different in the post-conceptual paradigm from that in the conceptual one - this is the source of his discoveries, this makes him one of the few artists in our cultural milieu who bring something original, unique and not replaceable into their work with the language as the medium of artistic statements. Part of these text pictures are messages mediated by "transformed coins" that map the world of consumer divinities as the new form of playing with the language that is different from the one we could follow in the 60-ies and 70-ies. The artist's visual texts are smudged, the painting powdered with metal dust, the drawings are intentionally greased. These operations bring new modifications into the structure of the language. In the past they would have impaired the purity of the language play, now they bring new aspects into the work of art and this makes them authentic and consonant with the period of their origin. Living classic artists of "art from language" - Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner extend their analysis by esthetic and semantic values of the space, colours or light, Heinz Gappmayr enriches the scale of analysed information. Just against this background we are best aware of the different articulations of Blažej Baláž who also thinks analytically and conceptually but does so in a different situation. That he worked his way to such results in the Trnava tusculum shared only with his wife (an excellent paintress) must be counted to his credit when the relevance of his work is appreciated.

Jiří Valoch