What tied the photographer Herman Pivk and the painter Jože Tisnikar together was their long-lasting friendship – Pivk created the first of many suggestive portraits of the self-taught painter from Slovenj Gradec already as his final work at the Academy of Education in Ljubljana. Pivk’s enchantment with the instinct-driven world of the awakened dead is no coincidence: the works of both of these sensitive artists are linked through their meditative reflections on the transience of all living things combined with a vision of another, dreamy, fantastical, almost surreal world populated by utterly naked, panting creatures – figures that grow organically from the metaphysical and symbolic context of stories about the marginal things in our lives. Even so, Tisnikar’s images are entirely ‘earthly’, while Pivk’s photographs are paganly unbridled and conceited. In his archetypical approach to civilizational traumas of passing and cessation, his works try to weave a connection with the unfathomable rituals of ancient shamans, who leave symbolic traces of the impressions left by their hands in the unconscious spheres of our waking awareness, like a sign of some eternal presence.

Text: Marko Košan