Cyril Blazo
dal 7/2/2007 al 24/3/2007
Segnalato da
7/2/2007
Cyril Blazo
Kunstverein Munchen, Munich
His interests lie in the almost endless visual wealth of media images, which he reconfigures with the most diverse methods into new, pointedly ironic formulations in his work. In doing so, Blazo avails himself of a broad spectrum of artistic forms of expression: collage; cut-out; various techniques of printing and copying; as well as the classical mediums of painting and drawing.
Solo show
Along with artists such as Roman Ondák, Boris Ondreicka and Denisa
Lahocká, Cyril Blazo is part of a younger generation of post-
conceptual artists, who, over the last decade, have been definitive
for an extremely lively and aspiring scene in Slovakia. His interests
lie in the almost endless visual wealth of media images, which he
reconfigures with the most diverse methods into new, pointedly ironic
formulations in his work. In doing so, Blazo avails himself of a broad
spectrum of artistic forms of expression: collage; cut-out; various
techniques of printing and copying; as well as the classical mediums
of painting and drawing. Starting point and basis of Blazo’s artwork
is his everyday practice of collecting. Images, newspapers and
magazines, photos, illustrations and books are piled on top of each
other in his studio, jpegs and digital images crowd his desktop.
Blazo’s mode of collecting has thereby little in common with the
conscientious and orderly method of an archivist, one should rather
imagine it as a permanent and nearly manic accumulation of material,
which is only beholden to the momentary and flighty fascination of the
subject.
Likewise, Blažo’s picture series and typologies do not emerge
in focussed and restricted work phases, but often over years of
disrupted processes that comprise of occasional revisits to already
established themes, interests and motives. Cyril Blazo’s art is an
art of secondary systems – as the critic Vladko Beskyd expresses it:
It reaps what it did not sow. In whichever medium, Blazo’s conceptions
are never a creation out of nothing; they are rather permeated with
the societal pool of our visual archives and medial semantics before
congealing into a newly arranged order of images. They pick up on
established material, translate the non-relational into new relations,
manipulate found imagery with minimal interference and additions, or
are satisfied with a mere enlargement or turn of an existing image.
Also his own works regularly become subject to this economy of visual
recycling. On the whole, Cyril Blazo pursues in his work a micro-
politics of minimal aesthetic interventions, wrestling back from the
stereotypical hallmark of the media the laughing third party's ethical
space of freedom. Born in 1970, Cyril Blazo lives and works in
Bratislava. Besides several exhibitions and participation in
exhibitions and his occupation as storyboard and graphic designer in
the 90s, Blazo was also a member of the artist groups 00 and BLONDIAK
(Blonde Boy). Since 1999 Blazo teaches at the University of Trnava.
With this first extensive showing, Kunstverein München presents a
survey of Cyril Blazo‘s work over the last 15 years. The exhibition
was originally curated by Lucia Gavulová for tranzit.sk in Bratislava
and forms the first part of an exchange between tranzit.sk and
Kunstverein München. The second part of this exchange will be followed
by a Kunstverein project in Bratislava in March 2007.
Opening: 8 february 2007
Kunstverein Munchen
Galeriestrasse 4 - Munchen
Opening hours: tue - fri 12 am – 7 pm; sat - sun11 am – 6 pm