présentation
Ecce homo ... Perhaps a more brilliant definition of the creation of Jozef Jankovlc does not exist. Were it not for the work he created for this year's Venice Biennial, nothing would have to be added. His comeback to Venice after twenty five years - "The End of a Paradigm" - traces the path he paved as a "coat-of-arms" creator of modern Slovak art.
On entering the art scene in the 1960s, the sculptor's daring talent opened new and unknown horizons for the Slovak sculpture. Already then he discovered the noema of his creation - man's destiny. He found the "Theme" which he identified with the image of the human figure for years. This simple fact, however, calls for an explanation. Jankovic expressed a different figurative vision as the one desired and accepted by the socially and culturally closed society he lived and created in. Removing the image of the hero from the pedestal, he replaced him with the image of the victim, of a humiliated and hurt humanity. Moreover, he even dared to argue against the essential paradigm of the socialist-reailistic culture, once dubbed by Maxim Gorky as follows: "Man - it sounds proudly"... This was somewhere at the beginning.
The road to life secrets traverses the human body... Fragments and human traces appear in his sculptures. He abandons traditional sculptural virtues, he does not model but he shapes. Embodiment becomes the starting point of his imagination. Nevertheless, it is not embodiment of the figure as such. The sculptor shapes the border between the body and the world which is a priori alien, a scene of drama and conflict. The delicate boundary, whether natural or alien, physical or non-physical, protecting the human body against the outer world, loses its original function and turns against it, transforming and deforming the bodily shapes into lifeless, amorphous and powerless "offshoots" of an unknown monstrous animal. The old integrity of the body and mind disintegrates into appalling fragments of human substances.
Jankovic's man has found himself in the very centre of the world whose sense he cannot grasp. Vanity, indifference and emptiness as well as feelings of anxiety and absurdity can only be overcome if he is not subordinated to convention and his own will and choice are at stake. The eternal antagonism between "I" and the "world" acquires the form of encounters between a Camus-like stranger and absurdity of the situation he inhabits Nothingness embodies the presence of existence. Initially, Jankovic explored alienation, the tragedy of human wandering through labyrinths without a way out, in a general plane, later his creation integrated' also aspects of historical and social directness, Human mono-dramas have acquired a specific image of the place in which they originated. Alienation is transferred from a universal level to that of man and the totalitarian power.
Human fragments have integrated into wholes; limbs have been reattached to bodies and heads: masks with a mute grin deprived of the miracle of vision by the powerful of this world, The shadow of man has emerged as a phantom in his sculptures, reliefs, drawings and graphic works. Man is alone, hidden in the crowd; he loses his individual face, his human as well as civic identity. His social identity kills his biological identity and vice versa. Paraphrasing Schopenhauer we can say that human life - tragic in its completeness - appears, in its particular details, as a comedy. Incidental and unexpected human encounters with a hyperthropic banality of ordinariness result in gags, shocks, grotesque paraphrases and anecdotes. Laughter for fear, framing the sequences of aimless bustle of Jankovic's "heroes", is but an answer to the distorted order of things.
Katarina Bajcurova, 1995 (extract)
