A New Reality for Old Photographs
In 2009, Jane Štravs made a series of black-and-white photographs presenting his theme in the specific surroundings of a seemingly emptied-out, boring, and indifferent metropolitan landscape. They prove the author’s interest in various architectural elements, the most outstanding among them being empty concrete walls. In real-life surroundings, such exposed walls would seem to be the right locations for inscriptions, posters, graffiti, and other forms of street and urban art. These are top locations that provoke the most daring and the best artists to fill them with their masterpieces. In such a context, a cold concrete wall can turn into a lively space for exhibiting all kinds of visual interventions, ideas, styles, concepts, and contents. With his photographs, Jane Štravs exposed these locations and spaces of potential new contents and invited Rone, the legendary, independent, provoking, daring, and penetrating Slovenian graffiti artist to cooperate with him. For a while it seemed that there was no location in the city that Rone hadn’t already occupied or branded. There was never a good location that Rone didn’t know about, or learn about. It was an overpowering space where nobody but him existed. Štravs’s generous gesture provoked Rone by offering him the protographs as unlimited possibilities in accordance with Rone’s artistic views; they were large format photographs prepared for presentation in an art gallery.
Rone tackled their cooperation in his characteristic way: originally, intuitively, and withour restraint. The history of photography tells us that interventions on photographs mostly had a certain practical meaning of stressing the reality of the photographed themes. Later on, the intention of painting over, adding interventions, and other treatments was more or less to distort or accentuate unrealistic designs. Štravs’s photographs deplace us into an indefinable urban, possibly even emptied-out post apocalyptic landscape in which a model does not purely represent a piece of clothing or a temporary fashion solution but rather an original life style. Rone had no qualms about identifying himself with the atmosphere, and his interventions in the photographs underlined the seemingly imaginary architectural elements, or else his sketched interventions turned figures into colourful mystical creatures which feel most relaxed among such cold, gray walls. The narrativeness of Štravs’s photography, his sense of composition and display as well as his way of exposing various details, e. g. architectural passages, building symmetry, raw cement surfaces, were additional motives for Rone’s interventions. Rone sketched over the basic design of the chosen photograph, stresing the selected architectural line; he turned the cold geometrical architectural element into a lively, colourful creature, which is at times but the image of a phantom or a ghost from some other environment, or else the imaginary transformation of sometning inanimate into a living creature. His choice of glaring colours, sprays, felt pens, coloured sellotapes points to a new and recognizable dimension of the finished artwork. n spite of having a noticeable and intentional duality, in the end the image blends into a new unity which surprises both the artists and their viewer alike. On the one hand, the interventions on the photographs uncover Štravs’s sense of the hidden and at first imperceptible details in the photograph, while on the other hand they point to Rone’s feeling for an imaginary transformation of the model and surroundings on the photograph. With his interventions, Rone offers a different, possible, unusual view of the potentionally imaginative unveiling of the photographed objects.
Rone entered Štravs’s expression space with his sketching artistic interventions, while Štravs with the graffiti intervention in a public space somehow tackled Rone’s creative space. In clearly visible, exposed spots he mimed the style of the uncompromising graffiti artist to mark the locations with a signature, which is a way of showing the appearance of a new artist on the scene, an artistic skirmish betweeen two groups or simply a deliberate urban intervention which disappeared from sight as quickly as it appeared. What remained was nothing but a series of photographs searching out a signature in various surroundings and in the context of graffiti art happenings.
On the one hand, the project of cooperation between the photographer and the graffiti artist combined the technical quality of reproducing reality or real life with so-called mechanical, chemical or digital methods of photography, and the hand-painted intervention as the primary creative process on the other. The starting-point of such new works is not the question of originality of the photographic method of imitating reality but rather creating tension by understanding the new reality of mixed media that complement and enhance each other, thus creating a new visual whole. Actually, Štravs’s invitation to Rone to add free interventions to his photographs is a way of seeking common points or hidden contents and a new reality in an otherwise perfectly set photograph.
Božidar Zrinski
Jane Štravs
Jane Štravs started exhibiting in the early 1980s as one of the more exposed chronographers and protagonists of the alternative cultural scene in Ljubljana. His reference list includes more than 40 solo exhibitions and more than 100 group exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad.
Modern gallery in Ljubljana presented a wide overview selection of his work in 1993. In 2003 the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Arts published his book Photographic Incarnations; the essays were written by Marina Gržinić and W.J.T. Mitchell. He received the Golden Bird Award in 1986 and was awarded at the Euro Press Photo exhibition in 2005. In 2009 he received the Trend Award for his photographic series American Express.
Štravs photographs are part of numerous public and private collections. Dela kot samostojni ustvarjalec na področju kulture v Ljubljani.
Rone84
Ron Preinfalk aka Rone84 is one of the most recognizable Slovenian graffiti artists, who has been uncompromisingly moving his sketches from the sketchbooks to the streets for more than two decades.
He graduated from the Famul Stuart School of Applied Arts in Ljubljana, Department of Classical Graphics. He is engaged in painting and painting interventions in public spaces. He has presented his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions - Pivka House of Culture (2016), Tam-Tam Gallery (2015), Toxic Gallery (2012) Biennial of Independents (2011), Street Art, MGLC (2004).
In 2013, he published the artist’s book entitled - And the beat goes on, in which he presents a selection of more than 350 of his favorite drawings, which he has created in his sketchbooks since 1988. The artist’s book received an award at the Brumen Design Festival in Ljubljana and was also presented at the Art Book Fair in New York, now the book has been included in the permanent collection of MoMA Artists’ Book Collection.
He lives and works in Ljubljana as an independent artist.
