Perhaps “that thing where a man finds his path, his peace (L.T.)” is also what we call art. Looking back at Laco Teren’s thirty year search we can see that he found his original path. At the beginning of his career in the middle of the 1980s, he was part of the generation that broke the Sorela (Socialist realism) dogmas and boldly reached for the art language of post-Modernism.
The nature of expressive painting was existentially close to him and allowed him to develop the phenomenon of painting in a new way as an ironizing reflection of social events. He focused on the visual symbols of period political icons related to the optimism of socialist construction as contentless and discredited. For Teren, the experience from this phase and from sinking into the mysteries of the painting of great artists was a process of internal maturing in his understanding of painting. That is why the principle of painting was transformed; he returned to the essence of painting. He saw things around him with different eyes and he searched for new themes and new visual symbols. He reveals the multi-faceted relationship between theme, symbol and content in them and updates their legacy. Drawing, an important role in his later work, represented the foundation for formative and compositional principles. He reached a new interpretation of the “damned” notion of beauty in connection with fine pastel colors: “I want my thing to be beautiful. Better beautiful than contemporary.” However, Teren does not distance himself from the present. He managed to create perspective over ignoring context while relativizing the notion of “the present.”
His work unfolds cyclically on several themes. Mostly he reaches for intimate than classical painting motifs: still lifes, women, nudes, dreams, nature motifs, flowers and plants from herbaria which he delivers with fine and sophisticated irony and even sarcasm. The “return to painting” is the artist’s intent.
This exhibition presents his recent large-format paintings and sculptures.
Eva Trojanová
Laco Teren was born in Bratislava in 1960. From 1979 to1985 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. From 1990 to 1991 he completed a scholarship stay at BINZ 39, Zürich. In 2004, he was a guest professor at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. From 2003 to 2013 he worked for the TRANZIT Foundation in Bratislava organizing exhibitions, seminars, lectures, workshops…
