VIKTOR KOPASZ WAS BORN IN KRÁL...
Viktor Kopasz was born in Král ́ovský Chlmec in Slovakia in 1973. After studying Secondary School of Design in Košice (1988-1992) he went on to study photography at FAMU in Prague (1992-1997), where he now teaches freelance in addition to running his own private courses; he lives in Prague.Kopasz creates individual diaries in which the monochrome images he uses - portraits, self-portraits, snapshots, still lives, and abstract close-ups - are digitally manipulated or colored with aniline dyes. His photographs are further reworked with the addition of text - pencil notes and rubber-stamped slogans in Hungarian, English, and Slovakian - glued clippings, public transport tickets, and other miscellanea reminiscent of particular events or evocative of some feeling or thought. His diaries, each a substantial volume in itself, fit together to comprise projects, some of which have been printed as autobiographies (Shadow play, In the Jungle, Kertelö).
In our modern world we have become accustomed to straightforward, easily deciphered information, and the complexity and sophistication of a Kopasz diary seems out of place. Despite this, the slightly melancholic atmosphere and clouded, unreal colorfulness that pervades Kopasz's work belong to an aesthetic that embraces central Europe and that harks back to Franz Kafka: although Kopasz differs from Kafka in that Prague herself has not rejected him, the sense of alienation remains. This aesthetic is reflected in the subject matter of the diaries themselves, which are often records of roads and journeys and of sojourns in the artist's home in eastern Slovakia, where the river Latorica lies at the heart of a uniquely poetic, almost surrealistic landscape.
The photographs (or more precisely, spreads of photographic images) in the diaries work on two main, sometimes intermingled levels. At first one sees Kopasz's interest in his surroundings, his friends and family, and in everything connected with these, but beyond this is the artist's highly subjective view of the world about him. As one looks at his work it is this world starts slowly to dominate: each spread is filled with a remarkable visual testament to this personal vision in which his photographs - through coloration, through the most subtle digital manipulation, through tracing-paper overlays - acquire the visual qualities of graphics. He connects the traditions of Czech and Slovakian imaginative arts; in his work we can feel echoes of the surrealism that found a specific form especially in central Europe. Solid painter, Arabesque, Waterland: these reflect the three main aims of the artist's search for nature (what artist could be a more solid painter than nature?).
The single unifying component of Kopasz's work is time, which is key to the very concept of diary recording: recorded events are always past, a memory - sometimes clear, sometimes clouded, but always alluded to whether by subject, message, or clear page. The diary also gives a distance to events once lived, a space to think, and a way to immerse oneself in the substance of the surrounding world.
Helena Musilová, Prague 2006