Technometry of Imprint

The exhibition Technometry of Imprint is a continuation of the cooperation between the International Centre of Graphic Arts and the Academy of Arts and Culture in Osijek, the Croatian Association of Visual Artists in Osijek and the Kazamat Gallery. Based on the allusion to Klein's anthropometry, the selection of works in this exhibition shows how the phenomenon of imprinting in the modern technological age continues the tradition that began tens of millennia before the dawn of contemporary civilisation when the awareness of the need to leave one's own imprint was deeply anthropologically interwoven with the essence of man at that time. Perhaps the time will come when the anthropological need to leave one's own imprint will overcome the technological logic of access to reality that prevails today.The artists exhibiting are Miran Blažek, Vadim Fiškin, Vladimir Frelih, Domagoj Sušac and Dorian Trepić.

The history of the image is as long as the history of mankind. It does not exist without man, but undoubtedly man does not exist without the image, for despite the long tradition of the logocentric understanding of the world, in which the world is understood as the totality of existence itself, the world of the image in the context of modern oculocentrism has shown that Western civilisation is defined by a paradigm based on visuality. Visuality has gone through many metamorphoses in its ten-thousand-year history, but it has never ceased to be the basis for the cognition of the real world. It is undeniable that many technological models of image-making have changed from the examples in La Cueva de las Manos to today's digital prints, but the image as an anthropological phenomenon has not come close to losing any of its distinctiveness during these turbulences. With the development of digital technology, however, the world of image representation has changed ontologically, and one of the endpoints of this is the development of the phenomenon of technical images. Žarko Paić interprets this transition as a radical act of transition to an autogenerative process of expanding visual space, in which the technical image passes from the category of representation to that of information and as such, in a self-moving sense, loses its ground and purpose in what lies outside of it, i.e. in the world reserved for representation. This situation raises the question of what and in what way the image communicates with the viewer as information and whether the semantic segment of the artwork has been replaced by an emotionally dry (Sol LeWitt) conceptual-digital paradigm?

The exhibition Technometry of Imprint is an attempt to present works that are essentially graphic works, using the techniques of modern graphic printing and reflection. The exhibited works by Miran Blažek, Vadim Fiškin, Vladimir Frelih, Domagoj Sušac and Dorian Trepić stem from a conscious approach to the phenomenon of imprint, which is one of the essential dimensions of the graphic medium, but the process leading to the final visual solution is removed from the traditional technological approach of classical printmaking. The basis of Blažek's work is a photograph of a gallery wall turned into an image, which is processed in a computer programme through layers and is printed on canvases and stretched on a picture frame. His photograph is thus transformed into an image that is exhibited on the wall of another gallery – at MGLC. Fiškin's works are shaped by the interaction between the light source of the projector and the shape that the light beam imprints on the wall. The artist is primarily interested in the dynamics of form and the desire to play with shapes with a photon beam, creating a dancing compositional frame in which the relationship between light and image is technologically intertwined and reflects their existence on the wall surface. Frelih's work Catalogue No. 13 041 664 is based on the discovery that unique serial numbers of printing inks do not always produce an identical shade The artist had prints with the same colour code printed in different cities and printers. After collecting almost two hundred of them, he designed the work by stacking the sheets side by side in a vertical and horizontal row, forming a large polyptych, demonstrating that an identical colour code does not always result in an identical shade, but that there are negligible deviations. Domagoj Sušac conceived his work in a similar way. By referring to IKB, the blue colour of Yves Klein, Sušac not only appropriately enters into a dialogue with Klein but by displaying a page from a book with a reproduction of the artist's work IKB 79 (1959), he also questions the relationship between the work, its imprint (reproduction in the book) and the reactivation of the work as a self-sufficient aesthetic fact. In Trepić's works, the feeling of summarisation dominates. In his digital prints, the artist uses the elements of the existing space as the compositional basis of the whole, so that the space in the physical frame of the work does not emerge from the mental image of the author, but from the existing template, which the artist reduces. By removing everything he considers superfluous from the existing template, he forms a space in Paint that no longer speaks only about the physical space of the template, because the search for the adequate space and its compositional harmony has been brought to a certain end. By "certain end" I refer to the fact that the result of the compositional relationships in the prints could have been different since the reduction process offers unlimited possibilities, each of which is realised on the basis of a template.

Based on the allusion to Klein's anthropometry, the selection of works in this exhibition shows how the phenomenon of imprinting in the modern technological age continues the tradition that began tens of millennia before the dawn of contemporary civilisation when the awareness of the need to leave one's own imprint was deeply anthropologically interwoven with the essence of man at that time. Perhaps the time will come when the anthropological need to leave one's own imprint will overcome the technological logic of access to reality that prevails today.

Igor Loinjak