Peter Michalovič interview

Macho: You first visited my studio in 2000. Since then, you have systematically followed the evolution of my work. You have also initiated, organised and even curated several of the shows at which my works have been exhibited. Back then, how did my work arouse your curiosity?

Michalovič: I have to admit I am pleasantly surprised to have systematically followed your work for fifteen years already. Perhaps “systematically” is not the right word. Anyway, I do try to see all your major works. That is important to me among other things because when I first visited your studio you were still trying to break into the Slovak art scene, so I have been able to see your work evolve at close quarters. This is always a highly valuable experience.

Macho: For me it was a very intense and revealing period. I met you at the Editing the Landscape [Strih na krajinu] symposium that Orava Gallery organised in Dolny Kubin. Since then we have met pretty often. You have lent me books, told me about interesting movies, I also attended one of your lectures at the university... You wrote an article about my artwork for Romboid magazine and, most importantly, you introduced me to artists, writers, filmmakers and other interesting people I have really being in creative contact ever since. I think we have done quite some work together. What do you think about that?

Michalovič: You make me recall so many things. You are right. It was an intensive period. “Editing the Landscape” opened for you new horizons of cooperation not just with me but also with Orava Gallery, which somehow has become your home institution. Thanks to the cordiality and, dare I say, courage of Orava Gallery director Eva Ľuptáková, we were able to put up your first major exhibition. It was a valuable experience because it is one thing to see these artefacts at home in your studio, and a different thing to see them displayed in proper exhibition premises. I remember we led endless discussions while installing it. I would react ad hoc to your work and you would immediately follow up, wondering aloud how far your artistic evolution would take you. Fortunately, it has taken you really far. I have the feeling that these discussions encouraged you. You began to transform your style more daringly, especially in terms of working with colour.

Macho: What was interesting for you in my early work?

Michalovič: Your early work impressed me because it was unconventional glass painting. Unconventional because it was not even painting. It was more drawing. In addition, you did not use glass as an ordinary, passive carrier but, instead, shaped it or, better yet, distorted it radically. The first works I saw were rather subtle. The drawing was delicate, as if trying to break free from the material, as if catching something that is just germinating, something that goes beyond a mere line but is not yet a complete meaningful figure.

Of course, I say this now based on what I remember. Perhaps my recollection is also influenced by what came afterwards. Anyway, I think this recollection is a good starting point for the story of your work. With hindsight I would say that in the beginning you wanted to feel glass as a material and to study the relationship between drawing and background. Gradually you started to use bigger sizes, to add colours, to combine coloured and transparent surfaces, to build layered spaces, until one day in your paintings started to appear clearly visible signs as symbols of things from this world.

Macho: I remember once when looking at my glass pictures you said that they reminded you of organised chaos. What did you mean by that?

Michalovič: When I said “organised chaos,” obviously I meant that when you draw a picture on the glass and then put it in the kiln, two things change. The structure of the glass changes and, therefore, also changes the primary or basic context of the artwork. Certainly, as an artist who creates glass paintings, you can foresee how the kiln is going to change the glass. But however much you predict the outcome, the final image will always bear traces of alteration and chance.

When I talked about organised chaos, I meant that chaos is order, too. However, this order does not respect the strict relationship between cause and effect. The same circumstance that may induce a specific effect once can produce a completely different one another time. I liked the fact that when you start creating you have a specific intention in mind, but the final result is always — sometimes more, sometimes less — shifted. And precisely these shifts bring about a pleasant surprise for you as well as for me.

Macho: Yes, you are right. Unexpected things always surprise. Sometimes in a pleasant, sometimes in an unpleasant way. But I want to say that as an artist I only like working with a theme or a motif I intend to exhaust completely. This is my protection against current artistic trends and social conditions. Up to some extent, this explains my staying loyal to abstract painting.

Michalovič: Sorry to interrupt you, but if I do not say this now, I will forget about it later. Just as you said, your work does not react to momentary conditions either in art or society. You are not the engaged type of artist. The best proof of this is your work itself. The first time I was in your studio, I noticed a series of paintings on the wall. They were small pictures. Each of them was a work of art of its own but, together, they formed a unit of a higher rank. This is the basis of your individual style. I have noticed that whenever you produce a new picture, it marks the beginning of a new series. This stability sharply contrasts with the creation of the so-called “grant” artists who immediately react to any opportunity they come across since only a prompt response can get them the money and the publicity they seek. A grant artist does not need a memory because the faster you forget what you have created, the faster you can react to changing political and artistic conditions. In their case, lack of memory means gain. It also means lack of individual style, though. For you, however, individual style is an asset.

Macho: At our first solo exhibition in Orava Gallery in Dolny Kubin, an art historian said she could finally see that my works were, in fact, paintings. How come did you see that my works were pictures from the beginning?

Michalovič: I have to say that you do not ask any easy questions. But I am grateful because it makes me think about things I would not think of otherwise. From the very beginning I saw your works as paintings maybe because I primarily approached them as individual objects. For me, a philosopher and an aesthetician, each picture is important an sich. This means that I primarily see them as an event, a singularity, as something that has no equal in the world. First of all, I always try to look at them apart from any context of paintings by the same or other artists. I always try to establish a dialogue with the picture. In this dialogue I try to find out what the image offers me and what it was that caught my attention at first sight. I notice its compositional arrangement, its expressive and semantic elements in mutual connection, and step by step I strive towards a holistic meaning. If this dialogue fails to start, I simply do not to deal with it. But if it does not, then I go back to it again and again and every time I look at it I revise my interpretation until I get one I am happy with.

The first thing that caught my attention in your early pictures was the asceticism of their expression. It irritated me. It made me keep going back to them. I eventually realised that asceticism is not an end in itself, but a means of highlighting the subtle composition that links together two formed and at the same time deformed matters into a single unit. It intrigued me that although your drawings are indeed drawings, they would cease to exist outside this composition. And although glass is glass, just by breaking its transparency, by “rumpling” it, you managed to accentuate its hitherto unseen or overlooked materiality. I know this might seem insignificant, but back then it was enough for me to consider them to be paintings and to show them, as a curator, at an exhibition.

Macho: I cannot judge up to what extent from my objects it shows that I am a believer. Do you, as an atheist, also consider this spiritual aspect?

Michalovič: You say you're a believer and I'm an atheist. I do not think this kind of division is appropriate as everybody is a believer in their own way. I know no one who does not believe in something. Everyone wonders if the universe was created or has been there forever, whether it is finite or infinite, or if the true nature of the universe is God or something else. After all, you just need to look up at the sky in a starry summer night to realise that you cannot seize the whole of it at a glance. I am fascinated by what goes beyond human measure. I am fascinated by the noble but, as a philosopher and an aesthetician, I am profoundly humble before it. This reflects in the fact that I use the category of noble very, very scarcely.

Now to your question. I have never, in the case of art, considered it adequate to separate the material from the spiritual, because what the word “spiritual” refers to is only accessible to viewers through the physical. Immanuel Kant said that people communicate because they do not see into each other’s mind, but if they did, they would not communicate at all with one another. An artist expresses his ideas through his work, through the material. In line with Jakobson, I say that the matter of art can be any type of material that has a denominating function, i.e. that is capable of carrying semantic meaning. If the artist does not respect the properties of matter, the object can fall apart in his hands. For example, when Michelangelo was sculpting his famous Pieta, throughout the whole process he had to respect the physical laws of marble. He knew very well that a single false stroke would be enough to break the whole statue into pieces. Breaking a sculpture with a single blow is not a problem. Putting its fragments back together is, though, a very difficult, perhaps impossible task. Of course every piece of work is preceded by an intention, an idea, ​​a topic. Name it the way you want. And if the artist wants anyone other than themselves to get this intention or idea, they need to express it in some kind of material.

Unlike God, who does not need anything to create out of, the artist creates by reshaping matter into an artistic form. When doing so, the material always puts up resistance. Sometimes chance might alter the originally intended outcome. That does not necessarily mean that this different outcome is worse. Searching, trying, erring and communicating about their work - these are the means of artists, those thinking beings. The produce of their thinking are artworks. And precisely because they are made by thinking beings, these works are spiritual creations. Every artist is, indeed, a demigod, since out of the world they create their own little world and present it to others.

In addition, spirituality can be understood as the sum of individual works. The set of produce an artist bears has its own life and enriches the whole human race. Organisms die. Life remains. This also applies to the life of works of art. It has always fascinated me how works of art that were created hundreds of years ago can still affect the thinking, feelings and actions of contemporary man.

Macho: You're an excellent example of the fact that my work addresses philosophers and aestheticians rather than theorists, critics and historians of visual arts. Why is it that philosophers like Miroslav Petříček, Vlastimil Zuska, and Miroslav Marcelli write about art?

Michalovič: That sounds as if the fact that philosophers write about art were something unusual. Well, it is not. Indeed, it was Plato and Aristotle who laid the foundations of thinking about art. Ever since, many philosophers have spoken and reacted to the different issues of art. The philosophers you mention are no exception. They write about art because they love it, and although every single one of them has their own personal preferences, with all of them you can spend hours talking about film, literature, visual arts, music or theatre. You know that very well yourself. Like me, they consider art to be a form of thinking, an equivalent to scientific and philosophical thinking. These three fields of culture are in constant communication. It is interesting to see how philosophers describe in concepts what artists express in words, tones, colours, lines, gestures, etc. In Slovakia reigns the idea that, for example, only critics and historians of fine arts should speak about fine arts. I think that is a serious mistake the result of insufficient education. A work of art can never be interpreted exhaustively using just one kind of analysis or interpretation. And come to think of it, I would say that every time a work of art is perceived, a new interpretation originates. It is enough to stand outside the cinema or in front of a picture in a gallery and listen to people talking about the way they understand what they have just seen, what is important for them, or what they have not understood. A work of art that fails to cause a reaction in the form of an interpretation of any kind is doomed to oblivion. Even the worst interpretations made by a lain man or an ordinary gallery visitor is better than silence. Silence does not do art any good.

Personally, I am fascinated precisely by interpretations that bring a whole new perspective on a work than the one I had. But back to your question. I know that each of these philosophers is interested in your work, even if everyone looks at it and sees something else. Their opinions confirm the thesis that the view you have of something is not what you actually see, but the interpretation of that. What intrigues them is how you tussle with glass, with its transparency, your attempt at a symbiosis of glass and colour, your efforts to make paintings something more than just mere representations of things we perceive in our world.

Let me give you a specific example. I remember your show in Prague. I took Vlastimil Zuska with me there. On the spot, without you or me asking him, he started to comment spontaneously on a painting. What most people saw in it were painted vessels and this annoyed you. He, however, very convincingly tried to prove that the painted has to be seen in relation to the other elements in the image, with its composition. According to him, although the depicted shapes at first glance resembled vessels, the key to understanding them lies beyond the mimetic understanding of art. The painting did not intend to depict things from our world. It intended to create a new world. What kind of a world it was Zuska explained to us on the spot. Ex abrupto, yet very precisely. And he undoubtedly managed to do so thanks to the fact that he is very well acquainted with the different theories of possible worlds. This helped him see in the picture what you said you were aiming for.

Macho: My work has somehow failed to follow the line of glass artistic creation in Slovakia even though I use conventional techniques for painting on glass. It has also failed to relate to the painting creation of my contemporaries. What do you think? Why is that?

Michalovič: This might have to do with various reasons. Usually this happens when two strong areas of fine art coexist side by side. It is necessary to bear in mind that art glass in Slovakia has a firm foothold, and most of the production consists of cut glass. This area enjoys international recognition thanks mainly to the fact that Václav Cigler, a world-wide authority and renowned glass and conceptual artist, worked in Bratislava for many years. As a pedagogue he taught and influenced many other artists, who eventually became prominent themselves. You, on the other hand, have never worked with cut glass. On the contrary, from the beginning you started creating glass paintings. Although you do use conventional glass painting techniques, your style is not at all conventional. Conventional painting on glass is narrative. It aims at displaying a story at a crucial moment. Your paintings, though — at least the early ones — contain no trace of narrative. If you have been influenced by something, it is abstract or geometric painting.

Painting has an equally strong position in Slovakia as artistic glassmaking. What scholar reflection concerns, it has an even stronger position. Historians, critics and theorists of visual art deal with it systematically. They have so much to work on that they do not need to look for new objects of study. Therefore, your artistic creation has remained beyond their field of interest.

To exist at the fringe of art, however, can also be very interesting. You can imagine yourself as Greek god Hermes who, among other things, is the patron of interpreters. Smugglers also move at the fringe and they, too, sometimes need the services of an interpreter. Smuggling can also be beneficial. After all, it provides the one side with what it lacks and vice versa. You, too, can smuggle into the realm of glass art something from the reign of painting and, likewise, bring into painting something it lacks and which is able to give it new impetus.

Macho: What changes do you think my work has gone through during these 15 years?

Michalovič: Big ones, really big ones. At the beginning you created small glass paintings. It means you applied subtle drawings onto glass. Some would see them as germ figures, others as purely abstract. The glass remained either transparent or coated with a soft layer of colour, mostly white. The pictures consisted of a single small glass pane. Gradually you started to deform the glass whose dimensions kept getting bigger until they became six-foot high pictures. But there have been way more important changes. For instance, putting several glass panes together and the increasingly more intense use of the aesthetic and poetic principles of geometric painting. The compositions became combinations of coloured surfaces intertwined with transparent areas as you knew that under it or over it another pane would go, and a colour area would be at the right same place. Your images thus begun to gain depth. Unlike traditional hanging paintings, in which depth is a mere illusion created following the rules of perspective, your pictures have real depth. You broke out of the surface and into depth conquering for yourself yet one more dimension. Something like that is possible only in your field of creation.

But let's move on! Another step forward was the change in the shape and size of the formats. You started to experiment with the shape of your glass paintings, using circular pictures, making incisions in them, bending their surface, an so on. The range of new formats you now use is much bigger than it used to be. I do not intend to make an exhaustive list, but I would like to emphasise that the change in format has never been the aim. It always has to do with the composition of the images. It can be said that the composition forces a change in the form and not the other way round.

Another new element that appeared eventually was the production of diptychs and triptychs. Although from the beginning you created whole series of images, those are fundamentally different from these ones. The composition is not restrained within the area of a single image, but “flows out” through the edges into the second and third image. Each image needs something outside itself. In this case, the unit is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Macho: You have been a major initiator of my cooperation with other artists. For instance Fila, Teren, and Jankovic. How did you know it would work out just fine? I resisted that for years, but you did not give up until I gave in.

Michalovič: I'm just an ordinary initiator, and maybe just a provocateur. I did not know it would work out. Maybe only in the case of Jozef Jankovič I was rather confident it would. In the case of Rudolf Fila, I thought him to be an appropriate partner for you as a painter, as much of his work deals with a painter's comments on different artwork, whether it be classic works of art or photographs from fashion and even erotically tuned magazines. At the beginning working with Fila had, so to speak, some hiccups for as a painter he worked with paint that looked identical or very similar before it was applied onto the canvas to what it looked like on the canvas. In the case of glass painting, though, colour had to undergo transformation, i.e. it looked different before than after the glass came out of the kiln. He just would not come to terms with this transformation. Nevertheless, the few grails you created together are really very interesting. That is, in part, thanks to the fact that Fila can transfer the distinctive traits of his style even to a small glass surface.

Macho: Yes, I remember Fila saying he could not work when he cannot see what the final outcome is going to look like. But when he realised he could see the brush strokes he readily put it to use.

Michalovič: Exactly! At the moment he discovered he could work with shape and ignore colour, he kicked off and began to create. He focused on the movement of the brush to create that vibrating surface that is legendary for him. It was awesome to watch. The result was amazing and, in my opinion, although you created just a few works, they were worth it.

Here I cannot fail to mention your comments on his pictures. You made some reproductions of Fila’s images, put them under glass and ornamentally interpreted them on the glass. When Fila saw them, he was taken aback but accepted the game and agreed on a joint exhibition. It was not a big one, but it was really interesting and I'm glad I could be there.

Macho: And then I created a number of common objects along with Laco Terén. How did the outcome of that cooperation caught your attention?

Michalovič: Laco Teren managed to leave in your compositions a sign of his work. You created the surroundings for him and he added something that gave the image new life or volume. Although you did not create many common works, looking back I think it was a good idea. One disc even has an imprint of his hand, which is a good example of a depiction directly controlled by the portrayed model. He left the portrayed model no room for shift. I'll ask you one question, just so that it is not only me who answers**: What made working with Laco Terrain interesting?

Macho: The fact that he took this cooperation kind of lightheartedly. I mean he did not care about techniques and would not keep in mind the properties of the material. Instead, he gave his expression free reins. That was exactly what I needed. I had become a prisoner of techniques and dived too deep into the glass world. With hindsight I confess that I, too, succumbed to these charms ... When we finally managed to get free from this outburst of expression, we saw there was, for example, just too much colour, too much creasing, just too much of everything. In fact those works took the shortest way to the trash can. But, as always, I put one of them away and a couple of years later I went back to that piece. I painted the Chinese sign of Yin - Yang over it, and all of a sudden the image was full of the harmony it lacked before. I really enjoy this kind of approach. The presence of another person helps me get rid of my own obstacles and prejudices. Cooperation is always good because, if successful, I can share glory with the other artist and, if unsuccessful, I can - at least as an alibi - leave them the blame.

Michalovič: Your cooperation with Jozef Jankovic constitutes a special chapter in your creation. In this case, I was sure it would work out just fine. Jozef makes an excellent partner. On common trips to Rome, Moscow and Budapest, we had plenty of time to discuss and spent hours talking about art and visiting galleries, so I knew that for you he would be an ideal partner for artistic dialogue. Together you produced a large collection of works, undoubtedly the largest of all. Some of them were Jozef’s works created with your technological assistance, while another part you created together. This intergenerational dialogue bore its fruits. Each of you had your own idea of ​​what a work of art must look like, and it is a good thing that you were able to find a common denominator. It was very good cooperation and I think that you should try it again after you have spent some time doing your own work. Not only you and Jozef would benefit from it but, above all, Slovak art would. And maybe if you do try that again, I will start calling myself a great initiator. Until then I cannot claim this “title”. I will ask you yet another question**: What do you think about your cooperation with Jozef?

Macho: Jozef always came to our meetings perfectly prepared. He brought some designs he had made on the computer, so I could also see a simulation of the materials. We agreed to proceed according to our designs and take the risk that the glass would not resist and break. And it often did, indeed. We needed to burn some reliefs three times. Imagine you have a kiln program that takes a week. And after a week you find out that everything has been in vain. You just go berserk! Fortunately, small images do not break so easily, but still we had to burn some of them five or six times. Despite all the problems glass and its properties kept making, we had a great time. Failure just made us try harder. I also have to say that teaming up with Jozef moved me on thematically as well.

Michalovič: It looks like we have swapped places and instead of answering I am the one asking questions. So my next question is**: By “moving on” do you have the cycle of “shirt” pictures in mind?

Macho: Absolutely. Those originated when I began working with photographer Jana Hojstričová. We created a number of works together in which I used her photos of scars. While working with her I got the idea to create pictures of human figures. Sometimes this figure is directly depicted, other times it is just insinuated, as a synecdoche, in the form of a child’s shirt. This phase of my work is not over yet. I do not want to make any assessments so far because I do not know where it is heading and how it will end up. What caught your attention in the pictures we created with Jana?

Michalovič: Cooperation with Jana Hojstričová resulted in your pictures suddenly showing photos of the human body and other objects. At the beginning you had a hard time coming to terms with mimesis and you seemed to have given it up for good. Now, however, it is back in your work. One could spitefully say that this is due to the rebound effect of the suppressed. A tempting explanation whose charm lies in its simplicity. In my opinion, however, the issue here is not the rebound effect, but a functional and innovative use of signs - indexes to create riveting contrasts. Your older pictures catch the viewer’s attention because of the absence of a storyline, the play of shapes and colours, the contrast between surface and depth. The more recent ones, on the other hand, invite the viewer to complement them with a verbal story. This twist cannot be reduced to just a rebound effect, among other things because these new pictures have developed some kind of virtual narrative, or better yet a stimulus, an appeal for narration. And this is obviously an onward movement.

Macho: In recent years, however, I have also worked with Svatopluk Mikyta and intervened in Ľudovít Fulla’s work. Do you know these works? What impression do they make on you?

Michalovič: Of course I know them. I will start with Fulla because this show is fresh in my memory. To build on a classic work is extremely difficult, but I am sure I do not need to tell you that. You must not approach this type of works aggressively as you will get nothing but utmost condemnation and disdain. However, you must not act as a humble servant either as that would be pathetic and degrading. To retouch the work of others by leaving your fingerprints on the commented works is completely useless in art. Commenting has to be inventive and it also needs to try to outperform the commented work. I think you were able to pass through Scylla and Charybdis uninjured and, even more, to gain something. Levity. You were able to create pictures that usurp something from Fulla’s work and develop it, for example, a change of tenor. The serious becomes ironic, the symptom becomes non-symptomatic, etc.

With Mikyta it was different. Your common images respect the traditional division between background and figure, and it is clear who created one and who the other. The result is a composition, not a mixture. A composition because - unlike a mixture - a composition can be broken down into the elements that form it. In the case of a mixture that is not so easy. Despite this simplicity, the result is good. In any case, you deserve praise for the courage to work with an artist with such a different orientation.

I guess we have exhausted the list of artists you have worked with. For me it has been interesting to summarise all of it. Among other things because I have written three books together with Vlastimil Zuska and I like to look back and recall the adventure of writing in cooperation with someone else. When you do so, you can afford to be different than when you just write alone. Perhaps it is this experience that has allowed me to see with different eyes works created by two artists working together.

Macho: You only think we have gone through the whole list. As a matter of fact, in the meanwhile I have begun to work with Ivan Csudai. I am full of expectations. What do you think, is it going to work out?

Michalovič: I am no prophet, but I think so. I have three reasons. The first one is easy. Ivan has worked with many artists. The best known project is probably that with Stanislav Diviš and Laco Teren, which resulted in was a series of paintings titled “Three Out of a Nice Set of Two”. The second one is based on personal experience. I had the opportunity to sit at several defences of master theses and doctorate dissertations at the Academy of Performing Arts. Ivan wrote reviews on them, either as examiner or adviser, and reading them it was obvious that he is highly sensitive towards the work of others. He is able to highlight the original, pointing out what is interesting, while being critical to what is superfluous or even detrimental for the work. He always tried to look at the images from the perspective of the artist. This helped him comment accurately and impartially on the works of others. The next reason is based on his work. As an artist, Ivan leads a continuous dialogue with the work of other authors. This allows him to choose a detail from someone else's work, revise it, and use it in his own compositions. Every time I can tell which artist a specific detail comes from, it strikes me how sensitively he has managed to clean it up from the artist’s individual style and how masterly he can make it part of his own repertoire of means of expression, containing both semantic elements and syntactic rules. Sometimes the said detail is an easily readable iconic sign. Sometimes it's just a semantically empty element, such as the shape of a drawing line. Anyway, I am looking forward to the outcome of this new project. As a matter of fact, I know Ivan’s creation very well and I cannot wait to see how you two are able to find an intersection connecting your different styles. Macho: You first visited my studio in 2000. Since then, you have systematically followed the evolution of my work. You have also initiated, organised and even curated several of the shows at which my works have been exhibited. Back then, how did my work arouse your curiosity?

Macho: You first visited my studio in 2000. Since then, you have systematically followed the evolution of my work. You have also initiated, organised and even curated several of the shows at which my works have been exhibited. Back then, how did my work arouse your curiosity?

Michalovič: I have to admit I am pleasantly surprised to have systematically followed your work for fifteen years already. Perhaps “systematically” is not the right word. Anyway, I do try to see all your major works. That is important to me among other things because when I first visited your studio you were still trying to break into the Slovak art scene, so I have been able to see your work evolve at close quarters. This is always a highly valuable experience.

Macho: For me it was a very intense and revealing period. I met you at the Editing the Landscape [Strih na krajinu] symposium that Orava Gallery organised in Dolny Kubin. Since then we have met pretty often. You have lent me books, told me about interesting movies, I also attended one of your lectures at the university... You wrote an article about my artwork for Romboid magazine and, most importantly, you introduced me to artists, writers, filmmakers and other interesting people I have really being in creative contact ever since. I think we have done quite some work together. What do you think about that?

Michalovič: You make me recall so many things. You are right. It was an intensive period. “Editing the Landscape” opened for you new horizons of cooperation not just with me but also with Orava Gallery, which somehow has become your home institution. Thanks to the cordiality and, dare I say, courage of Orava Gallery director Eva Ľuptáková, we were able to put up your first major exhibition. It was a valuable experience because it is one thing to see these artefacts at home in your studio, and a different thing to see them displayed in proper exhibition premises. I remember we led endless discussions while installing it. I would react ad hoc to your work and you would immediately follow up, wondering aloud how far your artistic evolution would take you. Fortunately, it has taken you really far. I have the feeling that these discussions encouraged you. You began to transform your style more daringly, especially in terms of working with colour.

Macho: What was interesting for you in my early work?

Michalovič: Your early work impressed me because it was unconventional glass painting. Unconventional because it was not even painting. It was more drawing. In addition, you did not use glass as an ordinary, passive carrier but, instead, shaped it or, better yet, distorted it radically. The first works I saw were rather subtle. The drawing was delicate, as if trying to break free from the material, as if catching something that is just germinating, something that goes beyond a mere line but is not yet a complete meaningful figure.

Of course, I say this now based on what I remember. Perhaps my recollection is also influenced by what came afterwards. Anyway, I think this recollection is a good starting point for the story of your work. With hindsight I would say that in the beginning you wanted to feel glass as a material and to study the relationship between drawing and background. Gradually you started to use bigger sizes, to add colours, to combine coloured and transparent surfaces, to build layered spaces, until one day in your paintings started to appear clearly visible signs as symbols of things from this world.

Macho: I remember once when looking at my glass pictures you said that they reminded you of organised chaos. What did you mean by that?

Michalovič: When I said “organised chaos,” obviously I meant that when you draw a picture on the glass and then put it in the kiln, two things change. The structure of the glass changes and, therefore, also changes the primary or basic context of the artwork. Certainly, as an artist who creates glass paintings, you can foresee how the kiln is going to change the glass. But however much you predict the outcome, the final image will always bear traces of alteration and chance.

When I talked about organised chaos, I meant that chaos is order, too. However, this order does not respect the strict relationship between cause and effect. The same circumstance that may induce a specific effect once can produce a completely different one another time. I liked the fact that when you start creating you have a specific intention in mind, but the final result is always — sometimes more, sometimes less — shifted. And precisely these shifts bring about a pleasant surprise for you as well as for me.

Macho: Yes, you are right. Unexpected things always surprise. Sometimes in a pleasant, sometimes in an unpleasant way. But I want to say that as an artist I only like working with a theme or a motif I intend to exhaust completely. This is my protection against current artistic trends and social conditions. Up to some extent, this explains my staying loyal to abstract painting.

Michalovič: Sorry to interrupt you, but if I do not say this now, I will forget about it later. Just as you said, your work does not react to momentary conditions either in art or society. You are not the engaged type of artist. The best proof of this is your work itself. The first time I was in your studio, I noticed a series of paintings on the wall. They were small pictures. Each of them was a work of art of its own but, together, they formed a unit of a higher rank. This is the basis of your individual style. I have noticed that whenever you produce a new picture, it marks the beginning of a new series. This stability sharply contrasts with the creation of the so-called “grant” artists who immediately react to any opportunity they come across since only a prompt response can get them the money and the publicity they seek. A grant artist does not need a memory because the faster you forget what you have created, the faster you can react to changing political and artistic conditions. In their case, lack of memory means gain. It also means lack of individual style, though. For you, however, individual style is an asset.

Macho: At our first solo exhibition in Orava Gallery in Dolny Kubin, an art historian said she could finally see that my works were, in fact, paintings. How come did you see that my works were pictures from the beginning?

Michalovič: I have to say that you do not ask any easy questions. But I am grateful because it makes me think about things I would not think of otherwise. From the very beginning I saw your works as paintings maybe because I primarily approached them as individual objects. For me, a philosopher and an aesthetician, each picture is important an sich. This means that I primarily see them as an event, a singularity, as something that has no equal in the world. First of all, I always try to look at them apart from any context of paintings by the same or other artists. I always try to establish a dialogue with the picture. In this dialogue I try to find out what the image offers me and what it was that caught my attention at first sight. I notice its compositional arrangement, its expressive and semantic elements in mutual connection, and step by step I strive towards a holistic meaning. If this dialogue fails to start, I simply do not to deal with it. But if it does not, then I go back to it again and again and every time I look at it I revise my interpretation until I get one I am happy with.

The first thing that caught my attention in your early pictures was the asceticism of their expression. It irritated me. It made me keep going back to them. I eventually realised that asceticism is not an end in itself, but a means of highlighting the subtle composition that links together two formed and at the same time deformed matters into a single unit. It intrigued me that although your drawings are indeed drawings, they would cease to exist outside this composition. And although glass is glass, just by breaking its transparency, by “rumpling” it, you managed to accentuate its hitherto unseen or overlooked materiality. I know this might seem insignificant, but back then it was enough for me to consider them to be paintings and to show them, as a curator, at an exhibition.

Macho: I cannot judge up to what extent from my objects it shows that I am a believer. Do you, as an atheist, also consider this spiritual aspect?

Michalovič: You say you're a believer and I'm an atheist. I do not think this kind of division is appropriate as everybody is a believer in their own way. I know no one who does not believe in something. Everyone wonders if the universe was created or has been there forever, whether it is finite or infinite, or if the true nature of the universe is God or something else. After all, you just need to look up at the sky in a starry summer night to realise that you cannot seize the whole of it at a glance. I am fascinated by what goes beyond human measure. I am fascinated by the noble but, as a philosopher and an aesthetician, I am profoundly humble before it. This reflects in the fact that I use the category of noble very, very scarcely.

Now to your question. I have never, in the case of art, considered it adequate to separate the material from the spiritual, because what the word “spiritual” refers to is only accessible to viewers through the physical. Immanuel Kant said that people communicate because they do not see into each other’s mind, but if they did, they would not communicate at all with one another. An artist expresses his ideas through his work, through the material. In line with Jakobson, I say that the matter of art can be any type of material that has a denominating function, i.e. that is capable of carrying semantic meaning. If the artist does not respect the properties of matter, the object can fall apart in his hands. For example, when Michelangelo was sculpting his famous Pieta, throughout the whole process he had to respect the physical laws of marble. He knew very well that a single false stroke would be enough to break the whole statue into pieces. Breaking a sculpture with a single blow is not a problem. Putting its fragments back together is, though, a very difficult, perhaps impossible task. Of course every piece of work is preceded by an intention, an idea, ​​a topic. Name it the way you want. And if the artist wants anyone other than themselves to get this intention or idea, they need to express it in some kind of material.

Unlike God, who does not need anything to create out of, the artist creates by reshaping matter into an artistic form. When doing so, the material always puts up resistance. Sometimes chance might alter the originally intended outcome. That does not necessarily mean that this different outcome is worse. Searching, trying, erring and communicating about their work - these are the means of artists, those thinking beings. The produce of their thinking are artworks. And precisely because they are made by thinking beings, these works are spiritual creations. Every artist is, indeed, a demigod, since out of the world they create their own little world and present it to others.

In addition, spirituality can be understood as the sum of individual works. The set of produce an artist bears has its own life and enriches the whole human race. Organisms die. Life remains. This also applies to the life of works of art. It has always fascinated me how works of art that were created hundreds of years ago can still affect the thinking, feelings and actions of contemporary man.

Macho: You're an excellent example of the fact that my work addresses philosophers and aestheticians rather than theorists, critics and historians of visual arts. Why is it that philosophers like Miroslav Petříček, Vlastimil Zuska, and Miroslav Marcelli write about art?

Michalovič: That sounds as if the fact that philosophers write about art were something unusual. Well, it is not. Indeed, it was Plato and Aristotle who laid the foundations of thinking about art. Ever since, many philosophers have spoken and reacted to the different issues of art. The philosophers you mention are no exception. They write about art because they love it, and although every single one of them has their own personal preferences, with all of them you can spend hours talking about film, literature, visual arts, music or theatre. You know that very well yourself. Like me, they consider art to be a form of thinking, an equivalent to scientific and philosophical thinking. These three fields of culture are in constant communication. It is interesting to see how philosophers describe in concepts what artists express in words, tones, colours, lines, gestures, etc. In Slovakia reigns the idea that, for example, only critics and historians of fine arts should speak about fine arts. I think that is a serious mistake the result of insufficient education. A work of art can never be interpreted exhaustively using just one kind of analysis or interpretation. And come to think of it, I would say that every time a work of art is perceived, a new interpretation originates. It is enough to stand outside the cinema or in front of a picture in a gallery and listen to people talking about the way they understand what they have just seen, what is important for them, or what they have not understood. A work of art that fails to cause a reaction in the form of an interpretation of any kind is doomed to oblivion. Even the worst interpretations made by a lain man or an ordinary gallery visitor is better than silence. Silence does not do art any good.

Personally, I am fascinated precisely by interpretations that bring a whole new perspective on a work than the one I had. But back to your question. I know that each of these philosophers is interested in your work, even if everyone looks at it and sees something else. Their opinions confirm the thesis that the view you have of something is not what you actually see, but the interpretation of that. What intrigues them is how you tussle with glass, with its transparency, your attempt at a symbiosis of glass and colour, your efforts to make paintings something more than just mere representations of things we perceive in our world.

Let me give you a specific example. I remember your show in Prague. I took Vlastimil Zuska with me there. On the spot, without you or me asking him, he started to comment spontaneously on a painting. What most people saw in it were painted vessels and this annoyed you. He, however, very convincingly tried to prove that the painted has to be seen in relation to the other elements in the image, with its composition. According to him, although the depicted shapes at first glance resembled vessels, the key to understanding them lies beyond the mimetic understanding of art. The painting did not intend to depict things from our world. It intended to create a new world. What kind of a world it was Zuska explained to us on the spot. Ex abrupto, yet very precisely. And he undoubtedly managed to do so thanks to the fact that he is very well acquainted with the different theories of possible worlds. This helped him see in the picture what you said you were aiming for.

Macho: My work has somehow failed to follow the line of glass artistic creation in Slovakia even though I use conventional techniques for painting on glass. It has also failed to relate to the painting creation of my contemporaries. What do you think? Why is that?

Michalovič: This might have to do with various reasons. Usually this happens when two strong areas of fine art coexist side by side. It is necessary to bear in mind that art glass in Slovakia has a firm foothold, and most of the production consists of cut glass. This area enjoys international recognition thanks mainly to the fact that Václav Cigler, a world-wide authority and renowned glass and conceptual artist, worked in Bratislava for many years. As a pedagogue he taught and influenced many other artists, who eventually became prominent themselves. You, on the other hand, have never worked with cut glass. On the contrary, from the beginning you started creating glass paintings. Although you do use conventional glass painting techniques, your style is not at all conventional. Conventional painting on glass is narrative. It aims at displaying a story at a crucial moment. Your paintings, though — at least the early ones — contain no trace of narrative. If you have been influenced by something, it is abstract or geometric painting.

Painting has an equally strong position in Slovakia as artistic glassmaking. What scholar reflection concerns, it has an even stronger position. Historians, critics and theorists of visual art deal with it systematically. They have so much to work on that they do not need to look for new objects of study. Therefore, your artistic creation has remained beyond their field of interest.

To exist at the fringe of art, however, can also be very interesting. You can imagine yourself as Greek god Hermes who, among other things, is the patron of interpreters. Smugglers also move at the fringe and they, too, sometimes need the services of an interpreter. Smuggling can also be beneficial. After all, it provides the one side with what it lacks and vice versa. You, too, can smuggle into the realm of glass art something from the reign of painting and, likewise, bring into painting something it lacks and which is able to give it new impetus.

Macho: What changes do you think my work has gone through during these 15 years?

Michalovič: Big ones, really big ones. At the beginning you created small glass paintings. It means you applied subtle drawings onto glass. Some would see them as germ figures, others as purely abstract. The glass remained either transparent or coated with a soft layer of colour, mostly white. The pictures consisted of a single small glass pane. Gradually you started to deform the glass whose dimensions kept getting bigger until they became six-foot high pictures. But there have been way more important changes. For instance, putting several glass panes together and the increasingly more intense use of the aesthetic and poetic principles of geometric painting. The compositions became combinations of coloured surfaces intertwined with transparent areas as you knew that under it or over it another pane would go, and a colour area would be at the right same place. Your images thus begun to gain depth. Unlike traditional hanging paintings, in which depth is a mere illusion created following the rules of perspective, your pictures have real depth. You broke out of the surface and into depth conquering for yourself yet one more dimension. Something like that is possible only in your field of creation.

But let's move on! Another step forward was the change in the shape and size of the formats. You started to experiment with the shape of your glass paintings, using circular pictures, making incisions in them, bending their surface, an so on. The range of new formats you now use is much bigger than it used to be. I do not intend to make an exhaustive list, but I would like to emphasise that the change in format has never been the aim. It always has to do with the composition of the images. It can be said that the composition forces a change in the form and not the other way round.

Another new element that appeared eventually was the production of diptychs and triptychs. Although from the beginning you created whole series of images, those are fundamentally different from these ones. The composition is not restrained within the area of a single image, but “flows out” through the edges into the second and third image. Each image needs something outside itself. In this case, the unit is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Macho: You have been a major initiator of my cooperation with other artists. For instance Fila, Teren, and Jankovic. How did you know it would work out just fine? I resisted that for years, but you did not give up until I gave in.

Michalovič: I'm just an ordinary initiator, and maybe just a provocateur. I did not know it would work out. Maybe only in the case of Jozef Jankovič I was rather confident it would. In the case of Rudolf Fila, I thought him to be an appropriate partner for you as a painter, as much of his work deals with a painter's comments on different artwork, whether it be classic works of art or photographs from fashion and even erotically tuned magazines. At the beginning working with Fila had, so to speak, some hiccups for as a painter he worked with paint that looked identical or very similar before it was applied onto the canvas to what it looked like on the canvas. In the case of glass painting, though, colour had to undergo transformation, i.e. it looked different before than after the glass came out of the kiln. He just would not come to terms with this transformation. Nevertheless, the few grails you created together are really very interesting. That is, in part, thanks to the fact that Fila can transfer the distinctive traits of his style even to a small glass surface.

Macho: Yes, I remember Fila saying he could not work when he cannot see what the final outcome is going to look like. But when he realised he could see the brush strokes he readily put it to use.

Michalovič: Exactly! At the moment he discovered he could work with shape and ignore colour, he kicked off and began to create. He focused on the movement of the brush to create that vibrating surface that is legendary for him. It was awesome to watch. The result was amazing and, in my opinion, although you created just a few works, they were worth it.

Here I cannot fail to mention your comments on his pictures. You made some reproductions of Fila’s images, put them under glass and ornamentally interpreted them on the glass. When Fila saw them, he was taken aback but accepted the game and agreed on a joint exhibition. It was not a big one, but it was really interesting and I'm glad I could be there.

Macho: And then I created a number of common objects along with Laco Terén. How did the outcome of that cooperation caught your attention?

Michalovič: Laco Teren managed to leave in your compositions a sign of his work. You created the surroundings for him and he added something that gave the image new life or volume. Although you did not create many common works, looking back I think it was a good idea. One disc even has an imprint of his hand, which is a good example of a depiction directly controlled by the portrayed model. He left the portrayed model no room for shift. I'll ask you one question, just so that it is not only me who answers**: What made working with Laco Terrain interesting?

Macho: The fact that he took this cooperation kind of lightheartedly. I mean he did not care about techniques and would not keep in mind the properties of the material. Instead, he gave his expression free reins. That was exactly what I needed. I had become a prisoner of techniques and dived too deep into the glass world. With hindsight I confess that I, too, succumbed to these charms ... When we finally managed to get free from this outburst of expression, we saw there was, for example, just too much colour, too much creasing, just too much of everything. In fact those works took the shortest way to the trash can. But, as always, I put one of them away and a couple of years later I went back to that piece. I painted the Chinese sign of Yin - Yang over it, and all of a sudden the image was full of the harmony it lacked before. I really enjoy this kind of approach. The presence of another person helps me get rid of my own obstacles and prejudices. Cooperation is always good because, if successful, I can share glory with the other artist and, if unsuccessful, I can - at least as an alibi - leave them the blame.

Michalovič: Your cooperation with Jozef Jankovic constitutes a special chapter in your creation. In this case, I was sure it would work out just fine. Jozef makes an excellent partner. On common trips to Rome, Moscow and Budapest, we had plenty of time to discuss and spent hours talking about art and visiting galleries, so I knew that for you he would be an ideal partner for artistic dialogue. Together you produced a large collection of works, undoubtedly the largest of all. Some of them were Jozef’s works created with your technological assistance, while another part you created together. This intergenerational dialogue bore its fruits. Each of you had your own idea of ​​what a work of art must look like, and it is a good thing that you were able to find a common denominator. It was very good cooperation and I think that you should try it again after you have spent some time doing your own work. Not only you and Jozef would benefit from it but, above all, Slovak art would. And maybe if you do try that again, I will start calling myself a great initiator. Until then I cannot claim this “title”. I will ask you yet another question**: What do you think about your cooperation with Jozef?

Macho: Jozef always came to our meetings perfectly prepared. He brought some designs he had made on the computer, so I could also see a simulation of the materials. We agreed to proceed according to our designs and take the risk that the glass would not resist and break. And it often did, indeed. We needed to burn some reliefs three times. Imagine you have a kiln program that takes a week. And after a week you find out that everything has been in vain. You just go berserk! Fortunately, small images do not break so easily, but still we had to burn some of them five or six times. Despite all the problems glass and its properties kept making, we had a great time. Failure just made us try harder. I also have to say that teaming up with Jozef moved me on thematically as well.

Michalovič: It looks like we have swapped places and instead of answering I am the one asking questions. So my next question is**: By “moving on” do you have the cycle of “shirt” pictures in mind?

Macho: Absolutely. Those originated when I began working with photographer Jana Hojstričová. We created a number of works together in which I used her photos of scars. While working with her I got the idea to create pictures of human figures. Sometimes this figure is directly depicted, other times it is just insinuated, as a synecdoche, in the form of a child’s shirt. This phase of my work is not over yet. I do not want to make any assessments so far because I do not know where it is heading and how it will end up. What caught your attention in the pictures we created with Jana?

Michalovič: Cooperation with Jana Hojstričová resulted in your pictures suddenly showing photos of the human body and other objects. At the beginning you had a hard time coming to terms with mimesis and you seemed to have given it up for good. Now, however, it is back in your work. One could spitefully say that this is due to the rebound effect of the suppressed. A tempting explanation whose charm lies in its simplicity. In my opinion, however, the issue here is not the rebound effect, but a functional and innovative use of signs - indexes to create riveting contrasts. Your older pictures catch the viewer’s attention because of the absence of a storyline, the play of shapes and colours, the contrast between surface and depth. The more recent ones, on the other hand, invite the viewer to complement them with a verbal story. This twist cannot be reduced to just a rebound effect, among other things because these new pictures have developed some kind of virtual narrative, or better yet a stimulus, an appeal for narration. And this is obviously an onward movement.

Macho: In recent years, however, I have also worked with Svatopluk Mikyta and intervened in Ľudovít Fulla’s work. Do you know these works? What impression do they make on you?

Michalovič: Of course I know them. I will start with Fulla because this show is fresh in my memory. To build on a classic work is extremely difficult, but I am sure I do not need to tell you that. You must not approach this type of works aggressively as you will get nothing but utmost condemnation and disdain. However, you must not act as a humble servant either as that would be pathetic and degrading. To retouch the work of others by leaving your fingerprints on the commented works is completely useless in art. Commenting has to be inventive and it also needs to try to outperform the commented work. I think you were able to pass through Scylla and Charybdis uninjured and, even more, to gain something. Levity. You were able to create pictures that usurp something from Fulla’s work and develop it, for example, a change of tenor. The serious becomes ironic, the symptom becomes non-symptomatic, etc.

With Mikyta it was different. Your common images respect the traditional division between background and figure, and it is clear who created one and who the other. The result is a composition, not a mixture. A composition because - unlike a mixture - a composition can be broken down into the elements that form it. In the case of a mixture that is not so easy. Despite this simplicity, the result is good. In any case, you deserve praise for the courage to work with an artist with such a different orientation.

I guess we have exhausted the list of artists you have worked with. For me it has been interesting to summarise all of it. Among other things because I have written three books together with Vlastimil Zuska and I like to look back and recall the adventure of writing in cooperation with someone else. When you do so, you can afford to be different than when you just write alone. Perhaps it is this experience that has allowed me to see with different eyes works created by two artists working together.

Macho: You only think we have gone through the whole list. As a matter of fact, in the meanwhile I have begun to work with Ivan Csudai. I am full of expectations. What do you think, is it going to work out?

Michalovič: I am no prophet, but I think so. I have three reasons. The first one is easy. Ivan has worked with many artists. The best known project is probably that with Stanislav Diviš and Laco Teren, which resulted in was a series of paintings titled “Three Out of a Nice Set of Two”. The second one is based on personal experience. I had the opportunity to sit at several defences of master theses and doctorate dissertations at the Academy of Performing Arts. Ivan wrote reviews on them, either as examiner or adviser, and reading them it was obvious that he is highly sensitive towards the work of others. He is able to highlight the original, pointing out what is interesting, while being critical to what is superfluous or even detrimental for the work. He always tried to look at the images from the perspective of the artist. This helped him comment accurately and impartially on the works of others. The next reason is based on his work. As an artist, Ivan leads a continuous dialogue with the work of other authors. This allows him to choose a detail from someone else's work, revise it, and use it in his own compositions. Every time I can tell which artist a specific detail comes from, it strikes me how sensitively he has managed to clean it up from the artist’s individual style and how masterly he can make it part of his own repertoire of means of expression, containing both semantic elements and syntactic rules. Sometimes the said detail is an easily readable iconic sign. Sometimes it's just a semantically empty element, such as the shape of a drawing line. Anyway, I am looking forward to the outcome of this new project. As a matter of fact, I know Ivan’s creation very well and I cannot wait to see how you two are able to find an intersection connecting your different styles.

Michalovič: I have to admit I am pleasantly surprised to have systematically followed your work for fifteen years already. Perhaps “systematically” is not the right word. Anyway, I do try to see all your major works. That is important to me among other things because when I first visited your studio you were still trying to break into the Slovak art scene, so I have been able to see your work evolve at close quarters. This is always a highly valuable experience.

Macho: For me it was a very intense and revealing period. I met you at the Editing the Landscape [Strih na krajinu] symposium that Orava Gallery organised in Dolny Kubin. Since then we have met pretty often. You have lent me books, told me about interesting movies, I also attended one of your lectures at the university... You wrote an article about my artwork for Romboid magazine and, most importantly, you introduced me to artists, writers, filmmakers and other interesting people I have really being in creative contact ever since. I think we have done quite some work together. What do you think about that?

Michalovič: You make me recall so many things. You are right. It was an intensive period. “Editing the Landscape” opened for you new horizons of cooperation not just with me but also with Orava Gallery, which somehow has become your home institution. Thanks to the cordiality and, dare I say, courage of Orava Gallery director Eva Ľuptáková, we were able to put up your first major exhibition. It was a valuable experience because it is one thing to see these artefacts at home in your studio, and a different thing to see them displayed in proper exhibition premises. I remember we led endless discussions while installing it. I would react ad hoc to your work and you would immediately follow up, wondering aloud how far your artistic evolution would take you. Fortunately, it has taken you really far. I have the feeling that these discussions encouraged you. You began to transform your style more daringly, especially in terms of working with colour.

Macho: What was interesting for you in my early work?

Michalovič: Your early work impressed me because it was unconventional glass painting. Unconventional because it was not even painting. It was more drawing. In addition, you did not use glass as an ordinary, passive carrier but, instead, shaped it or, better yet, distorted it radically. The first works I saw were rather subtle. The drawing was delicate, as if trying to break free from the material, as if catching something that is just germinating, something that goes beyond a mere line but is not yet a complete meaningful figure.

Of course, I say this now based on what I remember. Perhaps my recollection is also influenced by what came afterwards. Anyway, I think this recollection is a good starting point for the story of your work. With hindsight I would say that in the beginning you wanted to feel glass as a material and to study the relationship between drawing and background. Gradually you started to use bigger sizes, to add colours, to combine coloured and transparent surfaces, to build layered spaces, until one day in your paintings started to appear clearly visible signs as symbols of things from this world.

Macho: I remember once when looking at my glass pictures you said that they reminded you of organised chaos. What did you mean by that?

Michalovič: When I said “organised chaos,” obviously I meant that when you draw a picture on the glass and then put it in the kiln, two things change. The structure of the glass changes and, therefore, also changes the primary or basic context of the artwork. Certainly, as an artist who creates glass paintings, you can foresee how the kiln is going to change the glass. But however much you predict the outcome, the final image will always bear traces of alteration and chance.

When I talked about organised chaos, I meant that chaos is order, too. However, this order does not respect the strict relationship between cause and effect. The same circumstance that may induce a specific effect once can produce a completely different one another time. I liked the fact that when you start creating you have a specific intention in mind, but the final result is always — sometimes more, sometimes less — shifted. And precisely these shifts bring about a pleasant surprise for you as well as for me.

Macho: Yes, you are right. Unexpected things always surprise. Sometimes in a pleasant, sometimes in an unpleasant way. But I want to say that as an artist I only like working with a theme or a motif I intend to exhaust completely. This is my protection against current artistic trends and social conditions. Up to some extent, this explains my staying loyal to abstract painting.

Michalovič: Sorry to interrupt you, but if I do not say this now, I will forget about it later. Just as you said, your work does not react to momentary conditions either in art or society. You are not the engaged type of artist. The best proof of this is your work itself. The first time I was in your studio, I noticed a series of paintings on the wall. They were small pictures. Each of them was a work of art of its own but, together, they formed a unit of a higher rank. This is the basis of your individual style. I have noticed that whenever you produce a new picture, it marks the beginning of a new series. This stability sharply contrasts with the creation of the so-called “grant” artists who immediately react to any opportunity they come across since only a prompt response can get them the money and the publicity they seek. A grant artist does not need a memory because the faster you forget what you have created, the faster you can react to changing political and artistic conditions. In their case, lack of memory means gain. It also means lack of individual style, though. For you, however, individual style is an asset.

Macho: At our first solo exhibition in Orava Gallery in Dolny Kubin, an art historian said she could finally see that my works were, in fact, paintings. How come did you see that my works were pictures from the beginning?

Michalovič: I have to say that you do not ask any easy questions. But I am grateful because it makes me think about things I would not think of otherwise. From the very beginning I saw your works as paintings maybe because I primarily approached them as individual objects. For me, a philosopher and an aesthetician, each picture is important an sich. This means that I primarily see them as an event, a singularity, as something that has no equal in the world. First of all, I always try to look at them apart from any context of paintings by the same or other artists. I always try to establish a dialogue with the picture. In this dialogue I try to find out what the image offers me and what it was that caught my attention at first sight. I notice its compositional arrangement, its expressive and semantic elements in mutual connection, and step by step I strive towards a holistic meaning. If this dialogue fails to start, I simply do not to deal with it. But if it does not, then I go back to it again and again and every time I look at it I revise my interpretation until I get one I am happy with.

The first thing that caught my attention in your early pictures was the asceticism of their expression. It irritated me. It made me keep going back to them. I eventually realised that asceticism is not an end in itself, but a means of highlighting the subtle composition that links together two formed and at the same time deformed matters into a single unit. It intrigued me that although your drawings are indeed drawings, they would cease to exist outside this composition. And although glass is glass, just by breaking its transparency, by “rumpling” it, you managed to accentuate its hitherto unseen or overlooked materiality. I know this might seem insignificant, but back then it was enough for me to consider them to be paintings and to show them, as a curator, at an exhibition.

Macho: I cannot judge up to what extent from my objects it shows that I am a believer. Do you, as an atheist, also consider this spiritual aspect?

Michalovič: You say you're a believer and I'm an atheist. I do not think this kind of division is appropriate as everybody is a believer in their own way. I know no one who does not believe in something. Everyone wonders if the universe was created or has been there forever, whether it is finite or infinite, or if the true nature of the universe is God or something else. After all, you just need to look up at the sky in a starry summer night to realise that you cannot seize the whole of it at a glance. I am fascinated by what goes beyond human measure. I am fascinated by the noble but, as a philosopher and an aesthetician, I am profoundly humble before it. This reflects in the fact that I use the category of noble very, very scarcely.

Now to your question. I have never, in the case of art, considered it adequate to separate the material from the spiritual, because what the word “spiritual” refers to is only accessible to viewers through the physical. Immanuel Kant said that people communicate because they do not see into each other’s mind, but if they did, they would not communicate at all with one another. An artist expresses his ideas through his work, through the material. In line with Jakobson, I say that the matter of art can be any type of material that has a denominating function, i.e. that is capable of carrying semantic meaning. If the artist does not respect the properties of matter, the object can fall apart in his hands. For example, when Michelangelo was sculpting his famous Pieta, throughout the whole process he had to respect the physical laws of marble. He knew very well that a single false stroke would be enough to break the whole statue into pieces. Breaking a sculpture with a single blow is not a problem. Putting its fragments back together is, though, a very difficult, perhaps impossible task. Of course every piece of work is preceded by an intention, an idea, ​​a topic. Name it the way you want. And if the artist wants anyone other than themselves to get this intention or idea, they need to express it in some kind of material.

Unlike God, who does not need anything to create out of, the artist creates by reshaping matter into an artistic form. When doing so, the material always puts up resistance. Sometimes chance might alter the originally intended outcome. That does not necessarily mean that this different outcome is worse. Searching, trying, erring and communicating about their work - these are the means of artists, those thinking beings. The produce of their thinking are artworks. And precisely because they are made by thinking beings, these works are spiritual creations. Every artist is, indeed, a demigod, since out of the world they create their own little world and present it to others.

In addition, spirituality can be understood as the sum of individual works. The set of produce an artist bears has its own life and enriches the whole human race. Organisms die. Life remains. This also applies to the life of works of art. It has always fascinated me how works of art that were created hundreds of years ago can still affect the thinking, feelings and actions of contemporary man.

Macho: You're an excellent example of the fact that my work addresses philosophers and aestheticians rather than theorists, critics and historians of visual arts. Why is it that philosophers like Miroslav Petříček, Vlastimil Zuska, and Miroslav Marcelli write about art?

Michalovič: That sounds as if the fact that philosophers write about art were something unusual. Well, it is not. Indeed, it was Plato and Aristotle who laid the foundations of thinking about art. Ever since, many philosophers have spoken and reacted to the different issues of art. The philosophers you mention are no exception. They write about art because they love it, and although every single one of them has their own personal preferences, with all of them you can spend hours talking about film, literature, visual arts, music or theatre. You know that very well yourself. Like me, they consider art to be a form of thinking, an equivalent to scientific and philosophical thinking. These three fields of culture are in constant communication. It is interesting to see how philosophers describe in concepts what artists express in words, tones, colours, lines, gestures, etc. In Slovakia reigns the idea that, for example, only critics and historians of fine arts should speak about fine arts. I think that is a serious mistake the result of insufficient education. A work of art can never be interpreted exhaustively using just one kind of analysis or interpretation. And come to think of it, I would say that every time a work of art is perceived, a new interpretation originates. It is enough to stand outside the cinema or in front of a picture in a gallery and listen to people talking about the way they understand what they have just seen, what is important for them, or what they have not understood. A work of art that fails to cause a reaction in the form of an interpretation of any kind is doomed to oblivion. Even the worst interpretations made by a lain man or an ordinary gallery visitor is better than silence. Silence does not do art any good.

Personally, I am fascinated precisely by interpretations that bring a whole new perspective on a work than the one I had. But back to your question. I know that each of these philosophers is interested in your work, even if everyone looks at it and sees something else. Their opinions confirm the thesis that the view you have of something is not what you actually see, but the interpretation of that. What intrigues them is how you tussle with glass, with its transparency, your attempt at a symbiosis of glass and colour, your efforts to make paintings something more than just mere representations of things we perceive in our world.

Let me give you a specific example. I remember your show in Prague. I took Vlastimil Zuska with me there. On the spot, without you or me asking him, he started to comment spontaneously on a painting. What most people saw in it were painted vessels and this annoyed you. He, however, very convincingly tried to prove that the painted has to be seen in relation to the other elements in the image, with its composition. According to him, although the depicted shapes at first glance resembled vessels, the key to understanding them lies beyond the mimetic understanding of art. The painting did not intend to depict things from our world. It intended to create a new world. What kind of a world it was Zuska explained to us on the spot. Ex abrupto, yet very precisely. And he undoubtedly managed to do so thanks to the fact that he is very well acquainted with the different theories of possible worlds. This helped him see in the picture what you said you were aiming for.

Macho: My work has somehow failed to follow the line of glass artistic creation in Slovakia even though I use conventional techniques for painting on glass. It has also failed to relate to the painting creation of my contemporaries. What do you think? Why is that?

Michalovič: This might have to do with various reasons. Usually this happens when two strong areas of fine art coexist side by side. It is necessary to bear in mind that art glass in Slovakia has a firm foothold, and most of the production consists of cut glass. This area enjoys international recognition thanks mainly to the fact that Václav Cigler, a world-wide authority and renowned glass and conceptual artist, worked in Bratislava for many years. As a pedagogue he taught and influenced many other artists, who eventually became prominent themselves. You, on the other hand, have never worked with cut glass. On the contrary, from the beginning you started creating glass paintings. Although you do use conventional glass painting techniques, your style is not at all conventional. Conventional painting on glass is narrative. It aims at displaying a story at a crucial moment. Your paintings, though — at least the early ones — contain no trace of narrative. If you have been influenced by something, it is abstract or geometric painting.

Painting has an equally strong position in Slovakia as artistic glassmaking. What scholar reflection concerns, it has an even stronger position. Historians, critics and theorists of visual art deal with it systematically. They have so much to work on that they do not need to look for new objects of study. Therefore, your artistic creation has remained beyond their field of interest.

To exist at the fringe of art, however, can also be very interesting. You can imagine yourself as Greek god Hermes who, among other things, is the patron of interpreters. Smugglers also move at the fringe and they, too, sometimes need the services of an interpreter. Smuggling can also be beneficial. After all, it provides the one side with what it lacks and vice versa. You, too, can smuggle into the realm of glass art something from the reign of painting and, likewise, bring into painting something it lacks and which is able to give it new impetus.

Macho: What changes do you think my work has gone through during these 15 years?

Michalovič: Big ones, really big ones. At the beginning you created small glass paintings. It means you applied subtle drawings onto glass. Some would see them as germ figures, others as purely abstract. The glass remained either transparent or coated with a soft layer of colour, mostly white. The pictures consisted of a single small glass pane. Gradually you started to deform the glass whose dimensions kept getting bigger until they became six-foot high pictures. But there have been way more important changes. For instance, putting several glass panes together and the increasingly more intense use of the aesthetic and poetic principles of geometric painting. The compositions became combinations of coloured surfaces intertwined with transparent areas as you knew that under it or over it another pane would go, and a colour area would be at the right same place. Your images thus begun to gain depth. Unlike traditional hanging paintings, in which depth is a mere illusion created following the rules of perspective, your pictures have real depth. You broke out of the surface and into depth conquering for yourself yet one more dimension. Something like that is possible only in your field of creation.

But let's move on! Another step forward was the change in the shape and size of the formats. You started to experiment with the shape of your glass paintings, using circular pictures, making incisions in them, bending their surface, an so on. The range of new formats you now use is much bigger than it used to be. I do not intend to make an exhaustive list, but I would like to emphasise that the change in format has never been the aim. It always has to do with the composition of the images. It can be said that the composition forces a change in the form and not the other way round.

Another new element that appeared eventually was the production of diptychs and triptychs. Although from the beginning you created whole series of images, those are fundamentally different from these ones. The composition is not restrained within the area of a single image, but “flows out” through the edges into the second and third image. Each image needs something outside itself. In this case, the unit is more than the sum of the individual parts.

Macho: You have been a major initiator of my cooperation with other artists. For instance Fila, Teren, and Jankovic. How did you know it would work out just fine? I resisted that for years, but you did not give up until I gave in.

Michalovič: I'm just an ordinary initiator, and maybe just a provocateur. I did not know it would work out. Maybe only in the case of Jozef Jankovič I was rather confident it would. In the case of Rudolf Fila, I thought him to be an appropriate partner for you as a painter, as much of his work deals with a painter's comments on different artwork, whether it be classic works of art or photographs from fashion and even erotically tuned magazines. At the beginning working with Fila had, so to speak, some hiccups for as a painter he worked with paint that looked identical or very similar before it was applied onto the canvas to what it looked like on the canvas. In the case of glass painting, though, colour had to undergo transformation, i.e. it looked different before than after the glass came out of the kiln. He just would not come to terms with this transformation. Nevertheless, the few grails you created together are really very interesting. That is, in part, thanks to the fact that Fila can transfer the distinctive traits of his style even to a small glass surface.

Macho: Yes, I remember Fila saying he could not work when he cannot see what the final outcome is going to look like. But when he realised he could see the brush strokes he readily put it to use.

Michalovič: Exactly! At the moment he discovered he could work with shape and ignore colour, he kicked off and began to create. He focused on the movement of the brush to create that vibrating surface that is legendary for him. It was awesome to watch. The result was amazing and, in my opinion, although you created just a few works, they were worth it.

Here I cannot fail to mention your comments on his pictures. You made some reproductions of Fila’s images, put them under glass and ornamentally interpreted them on the glass. When Fila saw them, he was taken aback but accepted the game and agreed on a joint exhibition. It was not a big one, but it was really interesting and I'm glad I could be there.

Macho: And then I created a number of common objects along with Laco Terén. How did the outcome of that cooperation caught your attention?

Michalovič: Laco Teren managed to leave in your compositions a sign of his work. You created the surroundings for him and he added something that gave the image new life or volume. Although you did not create many common works, looking back I think it was a good idea. One disc even has an imprint of his hand, which is a good example of a depiction directly controlled by the portrayed model. He left the portrayed model no room for shift. I'll ask you one question, just so that it is not only me who answers*: What made working with Laco Terrain interesting?

Macho: The fact that he took this cooperation kind of lightheartedly. I mean he did not care about techniques and would not keep in mind the properties of the material. Instead, he gave his expression free reins. That was exactly what I needed. I had become a prisoner of techniques and dived too deep into the glass world. With hindsight I confess that I, too, succumbed to these charms ... When we finally managed to get free from this outburst of expression, we saw there was, for example, just too much colour, too much creasing, just too much of everything. In fact those works took the shortest way to the trash can. But, as always, I put one of them away and a couple of years later I went back to that piece. I painted the Chinese sign of Yin - Yang over it, and all of a sudden the image was full of the harmony it lacked before. I really enjoy this kind of approach. The presence of another person helps me get rid of my own obstacles and prejudices. Cooperation is always good because, if successful, I can share glory with the other artist and, if unsuccessful, I can - at least as an alibi - leave them the blame.

Michalovič: Your cooperation with Jozef Jankovic constitutes a special chapter in your creation. In this case, I was sure it would work out just fine. Jozef makes an excellent partner. On common trips to Rome, Moscow and Budapest, we had plenty of time to discuss and spent hours talking about art and visiting galleries, so I knew that for you he would be an ideal partner for artistic dialogue. Together you produced a large collection of works, undoubtedly the largest of all. Some of them were Jozef’s works created with your technological assistance, while another part you created together. This intergenerational dialogue bore its fruits. Each of you had your own idea of ​​what a work of art must look like, and it is a good thing that you were able to find a common denominator. It was very good cooperation and I think that you should try it again after you have spent some time doing your own work. Not only you and Jozef would benefit from it but, above all, Slovak art would. And maybe if you do try that again, I will start calling myself a great initiator. Until then I cannot claim this “title”. I will ask you yet another question*: What do you think about your cooperation with Jozef?

Macho: Jozef always came to our meetings perfectly prepared. He brought some designs he had made on the computer, so I could also see a simulation of the materials. We agreed to proceed according to our designs and take the risk that the glass would not resist and break. And it often did, indeed. We needed to burn some reliefs three times. Imagine you have a kiln program that takes a week. And after a week you find out that everything has been in vain. You just go berserk! Fortunately, small images do not break so easily, but still we had to burn some of them five or six times. Despite all the problems glass and its properties kept making, we had a great time. Failure just made us try harder. I also have to say that teaming up with Jozef moved me on thematically as well.

Michalovič: It looks like we have swapped places and instead of answering I am the one asking questions. So my next question is*: By “moving on” do you have the cycle of “shirt” pictures in mind?

Macho: Absolutely. Those originated when I began working with photographer Jana Hojstričová. We created a number of works together in which I used her photos of scars. While working with her I got the idea to create pictures of human figures. Sometimes this figure is directly depicted, other times it is just insinuated, as a synecdoche, in the form of a child’s shirt. This phase of my work is not over yet. I do not want to make any assessments so far because I do not know where it is heading and how it will end up. What caught your attention in the pictures we created with Jana?

Michalovič: Cooperation with Jana Hojstričová resulted in your pictures suddenly showing photos of the human body and other objects. At the beginning you had a hard time coming to terms with mimesis and you seemed to have given it up for good. Now, however, it is back in your work. One could spitefully say that this is due to the rebound effect of the suppressed. A tempting explanation whose charm lies in its simplicity. In my opinion, however, the issue here is not the rebound effect, but a functional and innovative use of signs - indexes to create riveting contrasts. Your older pictures catch the viewer’s attention because of the absence of a storyline, the play of shapes and colours, the contrast between surface and depth. The more recent ones, on the other hand, invite the viewer to complement them with a verbal story. This twist cannot be reduced to just a rebound effect, among other things because these new pictures have developed some kind of virtual narrative, or better yet a stimulus, an appeal for narration. And this is obviously an onward movement.

Macho: In recent years, however, I have also worked with Svatopluk Mikyta and intervened in Ľudovít Fulla’s work. Do you know these works? What impression do they make on you?

Michalovič: Of course I know them. I will start with Fulla because this show is fresh in my memory. To build on a classic work is extremely difficult, but I am sure I do not need to tell you that. You must not approach this type of works aggressively as you will get nothing but utmost condemnation and disdain. However, you must not act as a humble servant either as that would be pathetic and degrading. To retouch the work of others by leaving your fingerprints on the commented works is completely useless in art. Commenting has to be inventive and it also needs to try to outperform the commented work. I think you were able to pass through Scylla and Charybdis uninjured and, even more, to gain something. Levity. You were able to create pictures that usurp something from Fulla’s work and develop it, for example, a change of tenor. The serious becomes ironic, the symptom becomes non-symptomatic, etc.

With Mikyta it was different. Your common images respect the traditional division between background and figure, and it is clear who created one and who the other. The result is a composition, not a mixture. A composition because - unlike a mixture - a composition can be broken down into the elements that form it. In the case of a mixture that is not so easy. Despite this simplicity, the result is good. In any case, you deserve praise for the courage to work with an artist with such a different orientation.

I guess we have exhausted the list of artists you have worked with. For me it has been interesting to summarise all of it. Among other things because I have written three books together with Vlastimil Zuska and I like to look back and recall the adventure of writing in cooperation with someone else. When you do so, you can afford to be different than when you just write alone. Perhaps it is this experience that has allowed me to see with different eyes works created by two artists working together.

Macho: You only think we have gone through the whole list. As a matter of fact, in the meanwhile I have begun to work with Ivan Csudai. I am full of expectations. What do you think, is it going to work out?

Michalovič: I am no prophet, but I think so. I have three reasons. The first one is easy. Ivan has worked with many artists. The best known project is probably that with Stanislav Diviš and Laco Teren, which resulted in was a series of paintings titled “Three Out of a Nice Set of Two”. The second one is based on personal experience. I had the opportunity to sit at several defences of master theses and doctorate dissertations at the Academy of Performing Arts. Ivan wrote reviews on them, either as examiner or adviser, and reading them it was obvious that he is highly sensitive towards the work of others. He is able to highlight the original, pointing out what is interesting, while being critical to what is superfluous or even detrimental for the work. He always tried to look at the images from the perspective of the artist. This helped him comment accurately and impartially on the works of others. The next reason is based on his work. As an artist, Ivan leads a continuous dialogue with the work of other authors. This allows him to choose a detail from someone else's work, revise it, and use it in his own compositions. Every time I can tell which artist a specific detail comes from, it strikes me how sensitively he has managed to clean it up from the artist’s individual style and how masterly he can make it part of his own repertoire of means of expression, containing both semantic elements and syntactic rules. Sometimes the said detail is an easily readable iconic sign. Sometimes it's just a semantically empty element, such as the shape of a drawing line. Anyway, I am looking forward to the outcome of this new project. As a matter of fact, I know Ivan’s creation very well and I cannot wait to see how you two are able to find an intersection connecting your different styles.