Concurrence

Palo Macho has devoted himself to cooperation with various Slovak artists for almost 14 years. At the beginning of the project, there was the cooperation with Laco Teren, a painter, which gave rise to four circles with a diameter of 90 centimetres. It began at the symposium Cut onto the Country 2 in the Orava Gallery in Dolný Kubín in 2002. It was interesting that the authors made their common project, choosing glass as the project material. They managed to achieve an interesting relationship between figurative and non-figurative components; between a figure and its background.

In 2003 the cooperation continued with the painter Rudolf Fila, famous for his overpaintings. Macho appropriated 6 works of Fila, covered them with plate glass and made his own interventions on its surface. By overpainting Fila’s overpaintings, the overall meaning and aesthetic impression considerably changed. An overpainted catalogue of Slovak glass artists called Dewy Slovak Glass was a part of this project. The project Fragments (from Fulla) was created in 2004; it was prepared and exhibited in Ľudovít Fulla Gallery (2014).

The fourth project was a common one of Palo Macho and Jana Hojstričová. The photographer Jana Hojstričová prepared a series of authorial photographs and those were subsequently transferred by Macho onto glass. He intervened with his gestures and changed not only the meaning, but mainly the affective colour. This cooperation still continues and we may state that thanks to it, a figure previously absent in Macho’s works starts to appear in a peculiar way. The cooperation started in 2011.

In 2012 he created nine projects with the sculptor Jozef Jankovič. The sculptor’s style and painter’s style were successfully combined in several projects, which caused the creation of compact relief works which synergized the ideas of both artists. Although the spectator knows the origin of works, their compactness is at such a level that they cannot be retrospectively dismantled to what they once were; this effect is enabled by the character of the medium used - glass.

Palo Macho cooperated in 2013 with the post-conceptualism artist Svätopluk Mikyta. Mikyta created drawings directly on glass and Macho created specific backgrounds to them. An interesting game of foreground and background, drawing and painting developed between the two. Pencil drawings sealed in glass blocks were created by drawing of both authors together. In total, they created 24 works.

Currently the last cooperation is the common works of Macho and Ivan Csudai from 2016. The cult figure of Csudai’s paintings - Teddy Bear - has been added a third dimension; Macho created a new context to it and increased the variety of meanings. Teddy Bear cannot be considered an original iconic character, or an ordinary symbol; it is an image which is capable of generating a wide range of questions. It is something that it does not provoke with its hidden content, but with its own presence.

The extraordinariness of the cooperation of Palo Macho with other artists lies in the fact that he has always tried to find conjunctions between his own artist programme, the authorial idiolect and the authorial idiolects and styles of other artist which he cooperated with. Each cooperation is based on different principles and rules. The fundamental fact is that these works are interesting by their inner coherence and fullness of meaning. They never give the impression of inconsistency, despite easily identifying the presence of both authors. The catalogue (glass-maker workbooks) Coincidence is a part of the planned exhibition. The authors of the texts are: Zuzana Gažíková, Sabina Jankovičová, Martin Kaňuch, Jozef Kovalčik, Miroslav Marcelli, Peter Michalovič, Miroslav Petříček and Vlastimil Zuska.