Seagull, gone-astray
deep up into the river
Scratches from walls,
Scratches from
thickets. Scratches – guapo –
from India.
Black
foxes smear
their eyes with
berries.
Mikado
in silence, chains
rattling. And what’s in
your oubliette?
That storks
brought you piece
by piece and that I
put you together.
Tomaž Šalamun
On Pajk's Marpissa and Šalamun's Seagull …
Marpissa sounds exotic. It has been, perhaps,
photographer's accidental choice since he gave up his Land-Rovered voyages to
all kinds of deserted and, above all, exotic places. Who could tell? A dusty
road takes you from Marpissa past Marmara in Prodromos via Lefkes to Marathi,
the quarries of the noble Paros marble, snow-white, glittering, granulated,
compact and spotless stone, most highly valued sculpture material between the
Cycladic idols and Medici Venus and all to the 7th century A. D.,
only to extract the last bloc exceptionally for the construction of Napoleon's
mausoleum in 1844.
Whoever has had an opportunity to admire the so-calledHead of a Goddess from Chios of the 3rd-to-2nd centuries B.C. in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts will never forget the
crystalline texture of whiter-than-white stone, so sensuously suggestive that
one could feel the goddess's pulse of veins and her muscle tone. The soft translucency
in the bright daylight reveals her as an embodiment of the Aphrodite Urania, so strikingly vivid that one wants to touch her
soft cheek and press it against his own.
Twenty-three centuries down the road, the pendulum of
the Pygmalionian passion reached at Paros its second amplitudinal extreme point
in the textures under the lens of Milan Pajk's camera. While repressing the
seductive whiteness of the Parian wonder of creation – of nothingness and
everything at once – the photographer averted his eye and turned towards the
banal, the ephemeral chiplet of creation that can never be degraded to
nothingness: Georges Bataille's le
crachat, its repulsive beauty, the tartness of arrested evanescence,
senseless insignificance of the accidental. Images painted by the divine hand –
shapeless brecciations, immaterial light and shadow – their formlessness is re-called to beauty by
the eye and lens only.
A seagull, strayed, drafts from walls, woods and
India, berry-slush, chain-rattling, an oubliette…
In the most unusual and even dreadful way reflection
imposes itself in the juxtaposition of the image and its anti-image – of pain
and suffering and incapacitation of the two worlds separated by millennia. Once
upon a time hundreds of thousands of slaves amidst the white wound of the
slashed island's bedrock, in blood, sweat and tears, no hope, no future; today
hundreds of thousands of the wretched in limbo on the islands of Greece …,
nobodies, in neglect, travelling without a destination, nowhere …
All this makes Pajk's photographs tart and bitter and
their black-and-white poetry makes their sense.
Author of the exhibition
Milan Pajk
Graphic design
Ranko Novak
Coordination
Andrej Smrekar
Project was supported by
O.K.VIR
Tiskarna Povše
Cvetličarna Galerija Marjan Lovšin
Official wine of exhibition openings
Radgonske gorice d.d.