The title of this exhibition, presenting Slovak artists who work with traditional graphic techniques, reflects first of all their enthusiasm for graphic art, as well as amazement (in the positive sense of the word) that such things are still happening. Both feelings are evoked by the challenges that this technique faces. It seeks its own image between free creativity, craft, and design; also vis-à-vis digital media and the new experimental techniques, whose expansion into diverse forms, materials, and performances may cause the more traditional procedures to be seen as antiquated. — The situation in Slovakia may be seen as especially enigmatic. During socialism graphic art was not obliged to take on a propagandist role, which was assumed instead by the more forceful poster art. Graphic art thereby gained an opportunity to develop, in particular, its aesthetic refinement and craft mastery 4 . Combined with a wealth of imaginative realism, it culminated in the enormously successful work of Albín Brunovský (1935-1997) and his school. That gave an impulse to the following generation also, to perfect a mastery of detail that was highly attractive to viewers. But there was a trap lying in wait for those who pursued this strategy: ultimately its one-sided focus on form tended to weaken its power of statement. This procedure might bring the artist to a dead-end, leaving him/her in an open-air museum where the questions resonating in contemporary art could gain no access. — For this reason also, we are very glad to be able to present the work of eight young men and women who have incorporated traditional graphic techniques in their work. Many of them are “full-blooded” graphic artists, while others have found their way from different art disciplines or after a lengthy professional “detour”. If traditional graphic techniques are implemented in complex artistic programmes, this not only exemplifies the contemporary trend of interpenetration of art genres but also proves the capacity of those traditional techniques to provide a relevant and distinctive programme. For many, they expand (rather than merely complement) the potential of communication. The choice of artists, limited to those born between 1981 and 1995, offers a broad gamut of generational and artistic approaches. — As regards expression, we might speak of a tacking between two unofficial style groups. The “Hard Boiled School”, as defined by Alexandra Kusá 5 keeping a certain generational distance from the Brunovský school, prefers forceful expression with the acknowledged trace of the instrument (Tomáš Klepoch is its representative at the exhibition). Contrastingly, the “Gentle School“ 6, which leaves room for subtle poetics and refinement of form, may be found in the work of Kateřina M. Václavková and Pavol Truben. This form is not exclusively one for introspective vision: for Pavol Truben the delicate graininess of graphic art helps to emphasise the atmospheric quality of the dark wood in a story about blending of different opinion groups in the old fable of the wolf and the rabbit, for which likewise he prefers a historicising tenor. — Similarly Martina Rötlingová presents a topical theme, models of female beauty, combined with reference to famous women in the history of art, in dry-point. She plays with the illusion of a ruined or deformed fashion photography, thereby bringing its iconic status into question. In her graphic art she tips over this trompe l’oeil once again into the material of the paper from which it emerged. — Helen Tóth’s graphic work also has its basis in objectivity. She takes her departure from the capacities of the medium, which with the delicacy of its lines makes possible an expression that cannot be achieved in drawing or painting. With graphic treatment, her interest in the uniqueness of trees, their minor anomalies, and the fragments of memories and feelings that attach to them, acquires new dimensions, supporting the expressive colour and structure of the painting and the construction of objects from natural materials. — Realism, filtered through comics and streetart visuality, is the distinguishing mark of Matúš Maťátko’s works. He exploits the power of easily distinguishable elements, from which he creates symbolic narratives in a flat linear composition. Their principal theme is local history (from Slovakia, but also from Antwerp). Maťátko comments on their impact on our current thinking and national self-identification, and the relationship between Us and Them. — Tomáš Klepoch works similarly with realism. He is interested in commenting on society through sometimes bizarre scenes which are a visual result of our mentality: a building covered over by another building, or an effort at protecting a fence by cutting off overgrown branches. Klepoch isolates these elements in woodcut and linocut and recasts them, with a stratification of colour creating an atmospheric quality based on chance. By his procedures he continually questions the basics of how we define graphic art and the static image generally. — Stratification is one of the principles that Rita Koszorús seeks in graphic art. Her fully-committed abstract art expression in many ways draws from a powerful modification of the elements of reality and the principle of collage. Koszorús preserves this, both in lithograph and linocut; what is involved is not just transfer to an imprinted surface - rather, in the form of collage she also modifies the paper on which the printing will be done. Via pressure and partial covering, a new expression emerges, and a composition marked by both approaches. — Klára Štefanovičová, the youngest participant, brings to graphic work a conceptual element and subtle lines on the principles defined by the Gentle School. She presents her fascination with the moment and the locality, an interest associated more with the immediacy of sketching. Štefanovičová transfers this, however, to a schematised structure, which she employs as a powerfully abstracted set of symbols, based on an understanding of geometric shapes and full and empty forms. She manages to cast in this mould some compelling spiritualist issues and themes, affecting the art discipline in the sense of a planned acceptance of the fallibility of its moves. — Kateřina Makar Václavková likewise does not hesitate to experiment with form and content in existential or archetypal scenes, which always proceed, however, from her personal experience. She illustrates the paradoxes of transport and dull waiting with mild shifts in printing. It is precisely in the whole that one can see how they are modified, and therefore the artist often exhibits her series of railway stations between Hodonín and Malacky in a single unified belt. Themes taken from photographs are ordinary scenes, which she enters with a powerfully personal symbolic gesture, going directly against the principles of graphic art as a reproductive technique. She thus thematises, for example, temporality and the irreversibility of death by the progressive destruction of a matrix. — Each of the artists sees the traditional techniques in paradoxically different ways. While for one they represent liberation and an opportunity to re-evaluate the procedures used hitherto, for another they are still a set of precise rules and are therefore a form of stringency. What the works presented here have in common is, above all, desire: the desire to speak with a clear voice and an impressive opinion, as well as the desire and the courage to experiment. These artists set off for their experiment with an awareness of the tradition of the medium, which may not, however, be allowed to actually swallow them. 

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4 The eponymous exhibition in the Slovak National Gallery in 2017 presented five artists. Cf. Alexandra Kusá, Lucia Gavulová : Drsná škola - a iné historky zo súčasnej grafiky (The Rough School — and Other Stories from Contemporary Graphic Art), p 32, Slovenská národná galéria, 2017, ISBN: 978-80-8059-206-6

5 The eponymous exhibition in the Slovak National Gallery in 2017 presented five artists. Cf. Alexandra Kusá, Lucia Gavulová : Drsná škola - a iné historky zo súčasnej grafiky (The Rough School — and Other Stories from Contemporary Graphic Art)

6 The Gentle School, in a cross-section of seven artists from the middle and younger generation, was first defined by Silvia Čúzyová in a contribution to Flash Art, “Jemná škola” (“The Gentle School”). IN Flash Art Czech and Slovak Edition č. 56, 2020 ISSN: 1336-9644

Exhibition: Printing, still
Arists: Tomáš Klepoch, Rita Koszorús, Matúš Maťátko, Martina Rötlingová, Klára Štefanovičová, Helen Tóth, Pavol Truben, Kateřina Makar Václavková
Duration: Oct 9, 2022 - Nov 3, 2022
Where: Galerij Epreuve d'Artiste, Oudekerkstraat 64, 2018 Antwerpen, Belgium

Curator/text: Jana Babušiaková

Graphic design and catalogue: Jakub Tóth

Photo: collective

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