Color

Experiment

– ULUPUH Gallery, Zagreb, 2014

“A challenging “Experiment” with the world in colour”

Seldom do photographers whose jobs tie them to daily newspapers and programmes with set topics, find the time for experimentation with the photographic medium. They often lose that “youthful” impulse for exploration, their work becoming engulfed in routine. However, talent is unbothered by routine, using it to its advantage, as if playing it safe, knowing it is the best possible solution, compared to experimental slippages, whereby the work reads like experimentation for its own sake was the ultimate objective. Anto Magzan set very high demands for himself in the medium of photography right from the start.
It was bound to bring substantial changes in comparison to Magzan’s exhibitions of black and white photography. He is a prodigious portrait artist, not only when it comes to faces, but also as he paints portraits of cities and landscapes! Since a portrait is always psychological in nature, he needed to discover the photographic counterpart of the psychological essence of an urban landscape or a landscape in which only the “bare nature” persists.
Now, in the field of fashion, Magzan has embraced colour, and, in addition to portraits of faces in fashion, he has also created portraits of designer clothes. In the portraits of faces from the fashion world, it is precisely colour that accentuates their affiliation with the milieu, the true portrait of which is shaped through artifice, in the form of make-up and adornments… In the portraits of the clothes, the face is relegated to a secondary position, yet does not lose its role in the division of identity. What comes to the fore is that the portrait of the clothes is inseparable from the portrait of the face. When, on the other hand, Magzan shoots Igor Galaš’s creations in the landscape of Bager Lake in Zaprešić, the photographs are almost black and white, while the portrait becomes threefold: of a face, a dress and the lakeside ambience, which Magzan darkens in the manner of his black & white poetics! He has come full circle, and he may well do so, regardless of black and white or colour photography…

– Ana Lendva, journalist and art critic