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Slovakian Master Printers

Edinburgh Printmakers until March 2nd
3 stars
There’s a muscular gloss to much of the work on show in this showcase
of four Slovakian print-makers that forms part of an ongoing
international exchange initiated by the Scottish Society of Artists.
Much of this is to do with the mezzotint techniques by two of the
artists, which lends their extravagant images the air of 1970s fantasy
graphics, which captures some of the wilder imaginings of the decade
all four came of age.

This is most apparent in Karol Felix’s gold-tinged apparitions, in
which parallel worlds reflect back on each other with an ornate totemic
sheen. There are intimations of ancient alchemy too in Igor Benca’s
more technologically inclined work.

  Both Robert Jancovic and Marian Komacek’s contributions are even more
beguilingly opaque. Komacek’s pieces veer between a brooding
seductiveness and, on ‘Crosses’, a near Beuysian sense of
post-industrial detritus. Jancovic’s work is most interesting of all,
occupying a terrain where Icarus seems to swoop from the womb, while
elsewhere blades abound in impressions of Swiss army knives and
axe-heads that are more forensic dissection than bloody execution.

The List, January 2013

ends

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