Nadja Zgonik:
In his most recent project, entitled Laterna Magica, Marko A. Kovacic places various optical apparatuses and contrivances alongside one another, combining them regardless of the logic of development and regardless of the fact that more elaborate mechanisms have replaced and entirely substituted the simple ones. He anachronistically combines netting constructions, which weave themselves into a didactical manifestation of different concepts of usually invisible perspective structures; peepholes illuminated with artificial light and equipped with lenses through which one can see various real and imaginary settings; and photographs and video clips. The artist wishes to convince the spectator of the simultaneous actuality of different representative models.


By paying attention to visual themes, Marko A. Kovacic has turned from his original orientation, i.e. sculpture - by definition directed to haptics - to optics. He has condensed the procedure of touch which works on several levels, into one sole compressive point: vision. Thus Kovacic elaborates the point where the eye touches the material. He uses obvious representative models to transform sight into a materially present fact. He makes no effort to rearrange and interchange the roles of the subject of looking and the object, but rather wishes to freeze the optical fact itself, to keep its distance from the bearer of the view. He directs us into the world of looking itself, into the universal, super-historical point of the emergence of optical perception. Therefore we can say that artist's basic intention is to make visible, evident, and thus perceptible to the eye, the fundamental discourse of the ocular-centric society, i.e. the discourse on the visible - its complex structure is returned to the point of the emergence of sight, the eye, only to be liberated of the ideological frameworks of time, space, and the sacred.


An integral part of the exhibition was a calendar-catalogue which added a time dimension to Kovačič's exhibition: it means that his work accompanies the spectator throughout the year. The calendar form points to the entwinement of artistic activity with everyday life, the spheres which in Kovačič's case are much combined, since his collecting of objects is a matter of daily walks around the city, or casual rummaging among waste objects, and it does not necessitate a special artistic concentration. The artist's imagination is excited only when time adds the weight of history to and produces the selection of these objects. Thus, in the end, time appears to be the basic substance of the artist's work. Historical time is faced with the present, the active time of the artist's creativity with the passive time of the transformation of objects into obsolete symbols. Finally, the doubt arises as to whether our perception of linear time, and the progress it is supposed to bring with it, really corresponds to the world we live in.