In the traditional categorization of art Štefan Papčo (*1983) is a sculptor: after all, he graduated from the Sculpture and Space Studio headed by Prof. Jozef Jankovič, a classic figure of Slovak modern art, at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava (2001 – 2007). From a contemporary standpoint, now that art has long since abandoned such divisions of genres and kinds, we might describe him rather as a visual artist whose work has a conceptualised and intermedia character, though its basic premise is sculptural thinking in traditional and new materials (concrete, stone, wood, iron, silicone, glass, resin, etc.).
Principally, then, he devotes himself to sculpture, object, and installation, but he also uses new media (video, internet, digital technologies etc.), moving between figurative and abstract-symbolic forms. He focuses on researching risk situations which are connected with his main predilection, mountaineering; he also engages with high mountain landscape and Nature (subliminally, also with ecology). In many of his projects, he articulates “traditional” sculpture in outdoor activities and combines processual aspects with its working. Over the years he has become one of the most noteworthy and most awarded young artists in Slovakia. He received a prize at the Erasmus exhibition in Porto (2006), was a finalist for the Oskár Čepan Prize (2010), won the Best Open Studio Prize and Grand Prize at the Dumbo Arts Festival in New York (2011), the Tatra banka Foundation Prize in the category of Young Artist (2013), and the NOVUM Foundation Prize (2014), and for his Psycho-vertical exhibition in Kunsthalle Bratislava (2017/2018)[1] he was nominated for the Tatra banka Prize for Art (2018). This “bio-sketch” will do by way of introduction, though on individual points it would deserve more development.
The starting point and fundamental creative platform for Papčo’s sculpture is his passion for mountaineering, which he has been actively engaged in for years. Mountaineering has entered his work not merely as a theme, but as something distinctively and personally known and lived. The existential climbing experience, the situation vis-à-vis the rock massif, which one has to clamber over / conquer, posed a new perspective for his work: firstly, sensitivity to the perception of borderline life situations on the one hand, but also an openness to the sensation of space, a fusion with the framework of Nature and landscape, in which this existential situation (a sporting activity, but sui generis) is played out. – Richard Gregor, curator of his solo exhibition Moraine at the City Gallery, Bratislava (2010), put this succinctly: “Papčo has found a world within a world in mountaineering: individualist, elite, risky and difficult of access, but nonetheless democratic, accessible de facto by whoever wants to and dares to. And yet, currently, he is subjecting it to rational criticism – above all for its commercialization, dehumanization, and deromanticisation in the period following the revolutions of 1989. He criticizes the loss of a certain sacred exclusiveness and of the unwritten decency that should apply in charged, and for the individual often borderline, situations.”[2] Authentic experiences from extreme situations at the limit of one’s physical and mental capacities became, for Papčo, a means of expressing humanist thoughts and socially focused contents. Mountaineering for him, then, is not just an extreme sport, avocation or passion, which tests the limits of the individual’s capacities, but above all a powerful spiritual metaphor with a wider validity, ranging from the ethical category of freedom in the individual, civic and all-embracing social sense of the word, to the philosophical category of sublimity, through which one perceives the mountains and Nature. Furthermore, in the artist’s words: “The aim of sculptural and spatial experiments is an examination of the landscape, as a bearer of the potential to describe the long-term evolution of a society bound up with the specific place.”[3] His presence in the questions raised here is therefore dual. He approaches the landscape and the mountaineering community, on the one hand, as a rational enquirer, whose studies of borderline model life situations are intended to point to broader and more universal humanist and aesthetic contexts. On the other hand, however, as a mountaineering “insider” he is never entirely on the outside, and there is always the inevitable emotional equivalent that enters his work, the aspect of physical and spiritual involvement and personal identification. “Through the mountains, I try to look... also at something like love”[4] – for Papčo the bonding of the human being and the mountains thus represents a strange anthropomorphic and anthropocentric (perhaps also haptic) unity, like touching someone who is close...
Štefan Papčo, however, began to work with the theme of mountaineering while still a student. While seeking a way to research and comprehend it, at first he chose strategies of a conceptual nature.[5] In the video-installation Sketch Your Own Path (2004) he challenged the viewer to climb with the artist/climber along a frozen waterfall. Part of the work was real climbing, on an artificial climbing wall. On a screen there was a representation of a specific experience, which was interacting with an unrealizable intention of the viewer’s experience; the result was a joint “sketch with a rope”. The mountaineering path, the route by which one moves towards the summit (and the most highly esteemed, from the standpoint of sporting achievement, is the most difficult...), becomes, as we will see, a further close-woven motif of Papčo’s work. In his project The Way to Ganek Gallery (2005)[6] he linked the action moment of the initial ascent, “climbing out” a new route and recording a new line on an untouched rock, to create “a map of the non-material line of the experience” (in the gallery his recording was projected onto a framed painter’s canvas). In certain of his installations, the artist has worked with his own experience / his own fall (Pious Ones. Homage to My Fall, 2006), or with a video-recording of his climbing and bivouacking on a wall of the Italian Alps (Vertical Holidays, 2007). In other objects, he worked more with the poetics of materials and the moment of interactivity connected with the environment of artificial climbing walls (Indoor Sunset, 2007). In an extensive object The Main Range of the High Tatras (2008) he described the reality of the silhouette of a mountain range (made from plywood), whose peaks were rounded off by climbers’ handholds, used for many years, on an artificial climbing wall. The work was conceived as an homage to the exceptional performance of Vladimír Plulík, who in 1997 traversed the ridge-way in 50 hours flat. Papčo’s conceptual mountaineering fiction, however, proceeds within material sculptural parameters, relying not only on a consummate sculptural procedure but also on ready-made objects and use of new media.
Bivouac (2008 – 2011, SNG) became Štefan Papčo’s defining project. A wooden, traditionally carved sculpture of a mountaineer wrapped in his sleeping bag, made in life-size, which he himself manually carried and placed, roughly over a three-year span, in high mountain settings (first on the wall of Lomnický štít in the High Tatras in Slovakia and later in the Norwegian Jøssingfjord), where he exposed it to natural but extreme weather influences: rain, snow, wind. At the same time, he began photographing the sculpture with an IP camera, which was transmitted on the web or in a viewing hall. In due course Papčo again brought the sculpture down from the mountains to ground-level (where it became part of a gallery collection) and along with the running video recording he had made from this action, it became in the highest degree a museum / exhibition artifact. The huddled figure of the mountaineer (we see only part of his face) has a very strong aspect of reality, and not only because he has absorbed the patina of the high mountain atmosphere, with its instantaneous changes of weather. The sculpture, carved from soft lime wood, where the banal motif of the sleeping bag covering his body changes in the sculptor’s hands to a complex and thoroughly composed drapery (treated in the manner of the old Gothic masters), “comes to life”, so to speak, and in the dim light of the gallery (or on the running video) the viewer does not know at first sight whether this is a living or purely artificial scene, since its effect is so authentic. It is, however, a video-recording, which through a time loop communicates the work’s fundamental message to the viewer. That unfolds from its contextualization, i.e. from the situation of the sculpture in a real setting: the human character doggedly resisting the elements; the majesty of the high mountains. Vladimíra Büngerová made an apt comparison of the lonely figure of Bivouac to the motif of the “rückfigur in romantic painting – a figure with back turned to the viewer, who is silently contemplating in the landscape,” and she also adverted to another essential moment, the religious aspect of the work[7], the confrontation of the individual with a sublime and spectacular countryside and with the “divine” mystery of Nature. Besides, in an older personal statement on his work, the artist himself made reference to Kant’s thinking on the category of the sublime (Critique of Judgment)[8].
Comparable in its origins was the Citizens project (from 2010 to the present) – not without reference to a famous work by Auguste Rodin, Citizens from Calais. This is actually a group portrait of five important figures in Czech and Slovak mountaineering, namely Alena Čepelková, Stanislav Glejdura, Igor Koller, Pavol Pochylý and Miroslav Šmíd, eccentric personalities, some of whom were moving on the borderline of the law, and whose propelling motor was the desire for adventure. In the 1970s and 80s, a time of totalitarian rule, this sport became a symbol for them of self-realization, and beyond that, also of personal freedom, an escape beyond the real and fictive arbitrarily constructed boundaries of the “Iron Curtain”. In the name of “socialist” sport and the top sporting performances that the state promoted, they were able regularly to travel to foreign parts and conquer the (for human beings) inaccessible Alps, or other high-altitude climbing routes. While in Bivouac Papčo worked with the figure of an anonymous mountaineer, in Citizens the sportsmen and women are given their particular names; the sculptor has created them as whole-figure portraits on the basis of a thoroughgoing study of photo documentary material. The outstanding Czech mountaineer Miroslav Šmíd, who died in an unsecured ascent in Yosemite National Park on a solo attempt of the Lost Arrow route, had already been the subject of Papčo’s Sculpture Šmíďák (2012), which was his nickname. Papčo created a symbolic monument for him, placing his figure on a carved wooden plinth in a form resembling Brancusi’s Infinite Column[9], as a distinctive connecting link between earth and sky. The Citizens sculptures function as a group (they have set compositional linkages) but also as individuals: the sculpture group can always be installed anew in each new space, and active relationships can be forged between the figures. Important here is not just the composition of static and self-enclosed substances in space, but also their active dynamic, which betrays inner movement. There is concentration, strain, closedness and openness of corporal volumes and silhouettes, faces with personal features and expression, also body language, the speech of the hands – the gesticulation of the central figure, based on the already-mentioned Miroslav Šmíd (who in his own way forms the significant epicenter of the whole). While Papčo places bronze casts in the exhibition center, he is currently working to carry each wooden original to a specific high mountain setting, in an effort to place these distinctive “anti-monuments”, memorials to determination and courage, on routes which the mountaineers in question passed along or actually discovered (these sculptures too will be photographed online, and ideally they will subsequently be projected together in a five-way exposition in an exhibition space). The result, along with the real sculptures, should be a virtual sculpture group, transmitting the real situation of each one of them into a viewing hall. Again, what is involved is in the highest degree a processual work with a strong performative accent, whose resultant form can only be guessed at. One cannot entirely foresee what will become of this “superwork” – most recently Ivan Gerát and Marián Zervan adverted to various aspects of its pictorial structure and narration[10].
The figurative corporal idiom found further application in Papčo’s sculptural cycle All Good Things Aim at the Same Point (2013)[11]. Here, in an almost naturalistic manner, the artist made wood carvings of objects pertaining to the “equipment” of every active climber or tourist in the mountains: anorak, vest, pullover, trousers, sleeping bag... When you look at them more closely you realize that they are actually deformed, as if they had “turned wooden” in movement. The artist, that is to say, has depicted them in gravitation, under the pressure of the natural gravity which pulls them down to earth. He elongates and deforms proportions in such a way that they lose their original forms; they are protracted, or they actually levitate in space. At the same time, they are empty: evacuated, without the presence of man, of the human body, which they were originally supposed to protect. As likewise in the works of Papčo’s teacher Jozef Jankovič[12], this evokes an alienating and existential effect, which is accentuated by their joint exhibition in the generally asymptomatic exhibition space. The main line of movement in these things goes vertically, on the symbolic line along which climbers make their way upwards towards their goal, and on which they are actually constantly balanced as on a knife-edge, on the borderline of life and death.
The topos of Papčo’s work is the high mountain setting. This is the mountain as a “place with a secret”, not, however, the “mythic” mountain as in times of the romantic poets, for whom principally the High Tatras were such a place, a symbol weighted with a broad spectrum of historical and cultural meanings (and pseudo-meanings). Papčo’s view of the mountains is contemporary and civic-minded, even if also, through the mountaineering perspective, somewhat existentially exclusive. Because the experience which he offers to be lived through his work is not the experience of the ordinary mortal, and for this reason also it carries a certain romantic ethos. All of us, after all, want to know, experience, and in the last analysis adore, something which we do not know; the conquest of the unknown and inaccessible (in this instance of the high mountain environment) is linked not only with adventure and feelings of fear and awe but also with admiration for those who manage this...
In Štefan Papčo’s “expanded field” of sculpture we observe a strange inversion: a natural setting, a landscape, often inaccessible for ordinary people, becomes a distinctive art scene, an exhibition space. On the other hand, in the gallery and exhibition spaces (often in the significantly neutral “white cube”) he situates spatial compositions and new-formed conglomerates of the high mountain country, as references to its real formations, the peaks, rocks, moraines. His installation Arena Reload (2009) contains references to the classic minimalist work of Donald Judd: the viewer, from a worm’s-eye view of a series of geometrical blocks arranged vertically over him/her, gazes at 3D models of climbing routes transformed into geometrical modules. In the climbers’ world, the particular climbing routes often have very poetic, though psychologically disquieting, names such as Nirvana, Russian Roulette, Psycho-vertical, Road of the Hungry, Unquiet Souls, The Pious Ones... The climbers record them for themselves and their colleagues in a kind of cipher, with their own signs and symbols which exist for various formations and situations: pillar, ridge, open recess, interstice, cornice, wall, platform, cranny, trough, chimney, slab, loose rocks, trees, dwarf pine, anchors, bivouac, and so on. Precisely this system of graphic symbols, as a distinctive symbolic-pictorial language whereby mountaineers communicate with one another, gave Papčo the basis for a series of dematerialised, transparent constructions created preferentially from wooden and metal rods (Ninth Wave, Road of the Hungry, Tramp from the Lowlands, 2012): “In the gallery they become basically an abstract sketch, but one that contains a time dimension, a certain story, and a powerful romantic charge.”[13] The most monumental of them is the seven-meter tower Tatra Architecture (2013), a majestic structure and a “temple” of its kind, where there is no “inside” nor “outside”, but only one continual, transparent, open and unified space.
At other times Papčo intervenes with the landscape, fragments of it, directly in the gallery space: he brings in monumental new formations of a landscape “sculpted” according to actual models, but, to be sure, in other measures and materials. While the proportions of these fragments are reduced vis-à-vis reality, in the gallery space on the other hand, given its dimensions, they make an impression of magnitude, even enormousness, beyond its scale, which brings a peculiar inverse tension into the gallery setting. There Papčo situates a laminated model of a mountain (the highest of the three peaks of Torres del Paine in Patagonia), whose degree of reduction is adapted to the space where it is deposited (Tamed Mountain, 2009). He closes in the gallery room with an artificial substitute for a landscape, a model of a crucial place on the eponymous climbing route on the north wall of Kežmarský štít (Unquiet Souls 7+, 2009). In an old power station in Norway, he traced the rich and stately lineature of a construction reminiscent of a system of peaks, craning out over the empty industrial hall. Through the abstract geometrical “sketch” in space he wished to imitate another high-altitude phenomenon and weather manifestation: by a well-known inversion, it is the summits of the mountains that are clearly seen, while the valleys are submerged in a mist (TATRA Version, 2009). Elsewhere he fills the space with a suggestive “replica”, imitation, fiction: a rich spatial and material construction, analogous to the jagged and smashed-up scree, boulders and loam-covered blocks that a glacier pushes before it (Moraine, 2010). Again, here he recycled his favorite material (used plywood from an artificial climbing wall) to create simulacra of rocks. In another work he used ready-made real silt, connecting it with his structure (Hudson River, 2012). Or he brought the weather-beaten gable of a real wooden house into the exhibition space, as a representative symbol (Western Wall, 2017); most recently he has thematized the motif of time, flowing, growth, stratification, through a recording of biological traces (With the Flow of Water, Rectification, 2018).
Appropriating the names of climbing routes and giving them conceptual substance in sculptural material, Papčo produced the exceptionally effective cycle Cardinality (2014 – 2015)[14]. Just as the climbing routes have their names, the rock formations through which these routes lead also have received their names; and one must say that these metaphorical designations are very visual, even sculptural, calling out for their haptic reincarnation, e.g. Through the Red Roof, Right Edge of the Enormous Recess, Pink Flames, Central Corner, Ninth Wave, Cranny on the Black Slab... After his powerful figurative performance and tension in the Citizens cycle, it was if the symbolic-abstract register of Papčo’s sculpture quite naturally and spontaneously made itself felt once again. The post-minimalist objects of this cycle were described by their author as “mental architecture”. They show him connecting pictorial-symbolic codes, which had appeared in his work earlier: a rudimentary abstracted fragment of the mountain landscape is the semanticized graphic symbol of a route. What emerged here were enigmatic objects “to be experienced”, full of primary artistic imagery and power, combining variously and differently functioning materials, surfaces, structures and groupings (e.g. concrete, artificial stone, iron, silicone, glass). We may see all this as a sophisticated whole: the objects have identical foundations and are arranged in one horizon of view; the works may also be viewed as individual pieces with a very suggestive visual and sculptural identity.
Štefan Papčo seems to have had an essential need as a sculptor to touch both of the (historical) sculptural hypostases: from the beginning he was interested in the figure and its “haptic stereognosis”, and likewise in abstract, non-figurative sculpture as the play of new forms – but for him, however, this was never an end in itself. He had a bravura mastery of the sculptor’s “craft”, in diverse traditional and new materials and techniques. But there was also a very evocative topicality in his sculptural language, an expression of “here and now”. Although Papčo is not the first climber to reflect artistically on the mountains and mountaineering, he has been the most systematic in his approach to the chosen themes, and he has given them an original coding. Today it is probably he who has most clearly formulated a sculptural stance in relation to the tradition of Slovak (and European) modern and contemporary sculpture, towards bringing its language up to date by introducing new media and performative aspects: that is what is expressed when his work is described as “radical performative sculpture”[15]. At any rate, he is currently one of the most original artists in his discipline (sculpture); how that discipline is to develop further is, perhaps, uncertain and fraught with questions. But Štefan Papčo is proving by his works that a classically conceived sculpture, working with matter, touch and material, 3D real space and form enriched by the input of new media, can have a significant future.
Katarína Bajcurová, November 2018
photo (portrait): Štefan Papčo's archive
[1] Štefan Papčo. Psycho-vertical (named after one of the most intricate climbing routes in the High Tatras, on the frontier of Slovakia and Poland). The artist’s largest exhibition thus far was held in Kunsthalle Bratislava, 8. 12. 2007 – 25. 2. 2018, curator: Elena Sorokina. Without catalog; published the list of the works exhibited, press report, photographs and responses: http://www.kunsthallebratislava.sk/en/event/stefan-papco-psycho-vertical (accessed 26. 11. 2018).
[2] Gregor, Richard: Štefan Papčo. Kat., Exhibition cat. Bratislava : Galéria mesta Bratislavy, 2010, unpag.
[3] http://www.stefanpapco.com/texts.php (accessed 26. 11. 2018).
[4] Cited according to: PROFIL Štefana Papča. „Cez hory sa snažím pozerať aj na niečo také, ako je láska.“ Štefan Papčo v rozhovore s Danielom Grúňom. (PROFIL on Štefan Papčo. “Through the mountains I try to look at something like love.” Štefan Papčo in conversation with Daniel Grúň. In: Profil súčasného výtvarného umenia, XXII, 2015, No. 2, pp. 70-109. See also Grúň, Daniel: ”Nemožné je len jednou z možností:“ Lezecký priestor, komunity a ich dialekty v sochárskej práci Štefana Papča. (“The impossible is just one of the possibilities.” The climbing space, communities and their dialects in the sculptural work of Štefan Papčo.) In: Štefan Papčo. Bratislava : Zahorian&coGallery, 2013.
[5] While Papčo began by setting out for the mountains, i.e. somewhere up above, the Slovak conceptualists of the 1970s have already “been to” the mountains, specifically the High Tatras, and thence were making their way onwards to the cosmos (which was a peculiar form of resistance to the then totalitarian “socialist” reality). For Július Koller (1939-2007) the mountain was a place for possibly forging contacts with extraterrestrial civilisations; Alex Mlynarčik (1934) with the VAL group projected a utopian city Heliopolis, an ideal ring rising up over the summits of the Tatras. Rudolf Sikora (1946) examined them from the aspect of a topographer, who gazes upon the earth from above and models it in accordance with real patterns; Michal Kern (1938-1994) used to touch the mountains in which he lived with his own body so that he might fuse with them...
[6] There is a reference here to a project by Július Koller, for whom a 280 meters high and almost perpendicular wall in the High Tatras – Ganek Gallery or “ Július Koller’s U.F.O. – Gallery” was a space for “cosmohumanistic culture and “communication between earth and universe”. Cf. further: Grúň, Daniel (ed.): Július Koller: Galéria Ganku. Wien : SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, 2014.
[7] Büngerová, Vladimíra: Štefan Papčo. In: Flash Art CZ/SK, June – September 2013, p. 39. Papčo’s older work Šebastián (2012) was produced as a treatment of motifs from Christian iconography. But this work also may be regarded as an homage to his teacher, the sculptor Jozef Jankovič (1937 – 2017), who created a sculpture Šebastián in 1997 for an international symposium on the occasion of the Olympic Games in Seoul (property of NMCA Soul).
[8] In: Gregor 2010, unpag.
[9] Van Espen, Sylvia: All good things aim the same point/Všetky dobré veci smerujú k jednému bodu. In: Štefan Papčo. Bratislava : Zahorian&coGallery, 2013, p. 21.
[10] Gerát, Ivan – Zervan, Marián: Obrazy, narácie a performatívnosť v diele Štefana Papča Občania. (Images, Narrations and Performativeness in Štefan Papčo’s Citizens. In: Profil súčasného výtvarného umenia, XXII, 2015, No. 3, pp.6-21.
[11] The title adapts a quotation from the English writer and philosopher Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936). The exhibition Všetky dobré veci smerujú k jednému bodu/All good things aim at the same point was held in Zahorian&Van Espen Gallery in Bratislava (2013), curator Michal Stolárik http://www.zahoriangallery.com/new/vystava-vsetky-dobre-veci/ (accessed 26. 11. 2018).
[12] Jankovič in the 1960s worked with a technology of pouring plaster into a stocking and glove form, and thus he achieved a characteristically alienated corporal form, which became typical of him.
[13] Hanáková, Petra: Štefan Papčo. In: Bajcurová, Katarína – Čičo, Martin, eds.: Dve krajiny. Obraz Slovenska: 19. storočie x súčasnosť. (Two Countries. The Image of Slovakia in the 19th Century and the Present.) Exhib. cat.. Bratislava : SNG, 2014.
[14] The exhibition Mohutnosti/Cardinality was held in Zahorian&Van Espen Gallery in Bratislava (2015), curator Tereza Jindrová http://www.zahoriangallery.com/new/stefan-papco-2/ (accessed 26. 11. 2018).
[15] http://www.kunsthallebratislava.sk/en/event/stefan-papco-psycho-vertical (accessed 26. 11. 2018)
