ARTIST STATEMENT

Peter Fabo is an artist with strong fine art background in the medium of photography, and although he hasn’t given up on it yet, the development of visual reflection brought him to new processes of painting, object and installation.

The first photographic author’s books Diana (2008) and diploma work Name, city, animal, thing (2010) are akin to each other in their compressed intimate energy, combining the individual photographs into a compelling entity. In Diana, author chooses almost exclusively portraits of his girlfriend, eventually of things which are related to their co-existence. The images have variable technological origins and collecting them took six years. Here, a complex visual situation arises already - to be further developed in later gallery installations. The photographs are not in chronological order, what connects them is intuitive manipulation with the continuity of individual pictures, their mood, color, composition and relative contrast. The work appears as a book, its contents can however be read in different ways - one set of image material changes into a specific magical cycle, a hypertextual thought system for each viewer.

The book Name, city, animal, thing has similar character. Again, it can be read (viewed) as well as sensed. The used image material also circulates round one person, it’s not object though, it’s the photographer as the subject who chooses the motifs and creates the narrative line. In both author’s books, Fabo works with the archive and reinterprets them through ordering, which is an aspect that permeates all his work.

 

The act of photographing, beginning with the choice of theme, its exposure and ending with developing or digitalization is just the first part of the process for Peter Fabo. He then uses the individual shots as building blocks for the construction of more complex systems and interprets them in a way as to find new relations between them. Fabo uses this method of installation in the medium of a book, from which it overlaps into the medium of an exhibition. The photographs function as material units which, through their aesthetic qualities, constitute relationships between themselves and a specific gallery environment.  The exhibition project Contact through a contact copy (2014) combines the locality of a room with large windows facing south with a set of photographs, varying in size, technique and theme, which find their coherency only in common composition in the given room.  The author has covered some of the parts of the windows with foil, with which he has broken the regular geometry of window frame shadows. This intervention carries with it a light picture which forms a new synthesis with the individual photographs. Another author’s book, Peter Fabo 2013, works as a blueprint for this exhibition. It doesn’t  function as a subjective document anymore, but as an encyclopaedia of inspirations for Fabo’s work as a whole and his individual works, too.

 

In the book Peter Fabo 2013, reproductions of photographs appear along with the documentation of wooden objects and intarsia. Fabo deals with intarsia as a traditional - and today rather unusual - technique intensively approximately since 2012.  A demanding process in technique and time, the creation of intarsia consists of assembling and mounting of shards of differently colored and structured veneers which merge to form a picture.

With intarsia, Fabo’s accidence acquires a new formal language of abstract geometrization. The inspiration with cubism and constructivism is undeniable and conceded. Through it, Fabo brings post-modern elements into the whole game as well. For instance, the work Crystal  Cherry (2012) refers with its title not only to the motif, but also to the origin of the wood out of which the intarsia has been crafted. Therefore, readings of these artworks allow us to balance on the brink of translation between form and content.

 

Similarly to how geometrical elements form a balanced whole together within the individual artworks, the works are combined into the medium of an exhibition in a contemplative manner. In them, Fabo furthermore develops the postmodern game, combines the modernistic game with the unusual, sometimes even ironic elements. The exhibition Lacquer (2014) comes with a layered whole  where faint brownish color of the wood works along with striking wall painting in CMYK colour scale. However, there are conceptual gestures anchored within the peculiar artistic landscape which emerge sensibly from the abstract shapes, such as the word COOL in one of the geometrized intarsias. The exhibition L O N G E R (2015) in KIV gallery furthermore develops this reflection on interaction between form and content. The spectacular composition has the look of an environment, the particularities function as guides for the viewer, they refer to each other. However, there’s the undue presence of a banana which  makes the composition and its connotations questionable in analogical manner to, for instance, the cow in Malevich’s  cubist composition Cow and violin more than one hundred years ago (2013).

 

Therefore, in his exhibitions, Fabo works with multi-layered artistic and content relationships, reading of which is made easier right  through their formal uniquity and refinement.

 

Text: František Fekete

 

BIOGRAPHY

BIRTH
11. 12. 1983

EDUCATION
1998 - 2002 Technical Collegiate in Spišská Nová Ves, study of stone sculpture, Slovakia
2004 - 2010 VŠUP Prague, branch photography
since 2010 lector at VŠUP Prague

INTERNSHIPS
2007 - VŠUP Prague atelier of typography
2007 - Facultad de Bellas Artes de Granada, Spain
2009 - University of Art and Design, Cluj Napoca, Romania

INTERNSHIPS
2007 - VŠUP Prague atelier of typography
2007 - Facultad de Bellas Artes de Granada, Spain
2009 - University of Art and Design, Cluj Napoca, Romania

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2015 - L O N G E R, KIV Gallery / Karlín Studios Praha
2015 - Varnish ( having us on ), SET Gallery, Liberec
2015 - čočo #2, AM180 Gallery, Praha
2013 - Superstár, Kytka Gallery, Praha
2013 - čočo, City Surfer Office, Praha
2013 - Berlínskej Model - Praha
2011 - DOMINANTS, Gallery Photoport, Bratislava
2011 - Meno, Mesto, Zviera, Vec, Galéria Umelcov Spiša, Spišská Nová Ves
2011 - REM, Lumen Gallery, Budapest
2011 - Attachment to ad, Gallery Fotograf fotograf room
2010 - Flies and apple back, Gallery 207, Prague
2008 - The other side, Gallery Velryba, Prague

GROUP SHOWS
2015 - Recollect, Gaze, Material in Common, galéria Zuiun-an, Kyoto Japan
2015 - Delta, Czech centre, Berlin
2014 - Photo Festival, Museum, Moravská Třebová
2014 - About the Chair, 9th International Biennial of Photography and Visual Arts, Liege
2013 - 3, Kvalitář Gallery, Praha
2013 - Martina Pešková Peter Fabo, Gal. studijní a vědecké knihovny v Hradci Králové
2012 - Geological survay, 35m2, Praha
2011 - Obraz ve kterém žijeme, GASK, Kutná Hora
2011 - Obraz ve kterém žijeme, Galéria Emila Filly /Armatúrka/, Ústí Nad Labem
2011 - LAB EAST / LABOR OST, V8 Gallery, Cologne
2011 - Erotic Revue, GASK Gallery, Kutná Hora
2011 - In optima forma, Emil Filla Galley, Ústí Nad Labem
2010 - Familial feeling, House of Photography, Liptovský Mikuláš
2010 - Šraml fest Znojmo, Holy Pilgrimage of Cyril & Method II
2010 - LAB EAST / LABOR OST, Zurich, Switzerland
2010 - Semana Santa, Atrium Cafe Spišská Nová Ves
2010 - Pixel, Museum of art and design Benešov
2009 - Situations that could happen, Cafe Bar Vítkov, Prague
2009 - Two rooms, (A)VOID Gallery, Prague
2009 - Pixel, Gallery Velryba, Prague
2009 - Twilight zone, Underground Theatre, Prague
2008 - The essence, Mánes Gallery, Prague
2008 - Mask, Horažďovice
2007 - Šestka, Prague House of Photography
2006 - Not Just One Room But Many, Gallery AVU, Prague
2005 - 120th anniversary VŠUP, Mánes Gallery, Prague
2005 - Light, ČNB Bank, Prague

PUBLISHED PROJECTS
2015 - PORT no 21
2010 - Lab East - A person, place & thing
2009 - Fotograf magazine, title Family - published project Diana