Marko Modic has made his name in Slovenia as one of the most artistically distinctive photographers of the middle generation. After he started photographing as a student at the Biotechnical Faculty, his artistic quest became inseparably linked with extensive travels around the world as well as with extreme sport exploits. In the 1980s and 1990s, his photographic endeavours were often accentuated by performances, with painting, drawing and writing remaining his modes of expression up until today. Modic has been creating and exhibiting both locally and abroad (Ecuador, Patagonia, Canada, USA…). He has put on over 40 solo exhibitions, starting with a show in Ljubljana’s Museum of Modern Art in 1988 and continuing in many notable galleries in Slovenia and around the world. His photo-monographs published by renowned publishing houses will now be joined by a comprehensive catalogue accompanying the exhibition to be seen in the Jakopič Gallery. The catalogue contains over 100 photographs and photomontages pertaining to various series and dating to different periods. Modic’s approach to photography (the shift from analogue to digital technology was made a decade ago) has remained outstandingly individual and elementary, which is particularly manifested in his refusal to apply computer manipulation or postproduction to his photographs.

The Fifth Element overview photographic exhibition now brings a refined and conceptual curatorial selection of works taken from Modic’s vast oeuvre which has been accumulating over the last three decades. The photographs are grouped, as four series, around the four elements regardless of the time they were taken. The series whose nature is best described by the oxymorons the artist has himself created are characterised by the non-physical and omnipresent fifth element, flowing freely within them, especially in the form of photomontage. They present viewers with the challenging task of an inner reading: only rarely is water really water, fire is often cold, and the air can only be discerned in what the viewer feels when faced with a photograph, even though its actual motif might – in the end – be a hard metal. The omnipresence of the fifth element in all of the series grouped around the four elements (with the structure of these series being largely based on ‘pure’ photographs) is apparently invisible, seamlessly integrated, yet it calls into question their identity: as a result of both intense abstracting and the previewed photomontages (in the digital environment, these are fully created within the camera), the line between pure photography and photomontage is sometimes completely blurred. It might be said that this is the aim of the exhibition: to invite viewers to enter the artist’s widely imaginative and, quite often, surrealist world. The artist lends a helping hand in providing all his photomontages with imaginary captions: these not only comprise the place where the photographs were taken but may be considered as amounting to his intimate ‘poetry’. However, the captions only help further entangle the Gordian knot of the meaning conveyed by his message. This knot can only be cut by surrendering, by abandoning common sense, and thus opening the door into the artist’s world where there are no logical explanations but only powerful experiences.

The exhibition, in itself a total work of art, aims to give viewers an opportunity to inhabit the artist’s world, a world which is abstract, conceptual and associative; finally, this world is a world of curiosities, often even a world of artistic jargon and illegible messages. Modic’s burning interest in everyday phenomena taken from either animate or inanimate nature which helps him find magic in the most obscure details aims, by evoking elementary feelings in us, to invite us to become aware of the life surrounding us all, the life we have long grown indifferent to.

—Marija Skočir