STANE JAGODIČ: X-RAY ART
March 7 – April 5, 2008
The present retrospective exhibition is linked exclusively to a specific segment of his creative take on x-ray montages. In this instance, the artist concentrated on combining the scientific use of the photographic media and its artistic perception, which is based on adding and sublimation of useful everyday products, their transformation and re-evaluation of their initial meaning. The x-ray photographs thus become an irreplaceable segment of the author’s creation and one of the methods of many expressive experiments of penetration into the inner structures of organic and inorganic elements of the world, human or machine. During further processing, the x-rays are additionally equipped with selected elements. These elements are taken out of everyday life – waste materials of the modern world are placed into the integrated image of his projects and so adopt fresh values and symbolic meanings. His creations in the two x-ray series are unique and thus in contrast with photography’s capacity for reproducibility. Throughout this segment of his opus, Stane Jagodič emphasizes the everlasting search for hidden and untouched worlds, usually invisible to the bare eye, but still indispensable for the activity of a certain integral system. Similar experiments are also used with completely different constellations, in planning various photographs, collages, assemblages and installations. The presently finished project Zoo-Poetika (Zoo-Poetics) probes into three-dimensional objects and their inner structures. It joins different elements, which are based on assembling the ready made objects into a new whole.
The origins of the retrospective exhibition X-Ray Art can be found within the quarter of a century long authorial activity of Stane Jagodič. It is based on thematic and aesthetic grounds connected to the historical avant-garde, especially to the two main influential protagonists and role models Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The two completed series were created at completely different moments in time. The first one saw the light of day in 1972, when the artist was exploring the laws and possibilities of these tools; the second in the mid 90’s, when the same ideas, but in a more mature form, rushed to the surface again and materialized in a well-rounded series. In 1997, this series could be seen in the review publication Častilec svetlobe, srebra in rje (The Worshipper of Light, Silver and Rust), which accompanied the exhibition at the Slovenian Cultural Center Korotan in Vienna; the foreword was written by Drago Medved. The present exhibition of Stane Jagodič’s works at the Photon Gallery focuses on and establishes the unified context of his series X-Ray Art.
