Black & White

Through the Eye of a Needle

– Cultural Information Centre KIC, Zagreb, 2015

“Snatched from darkness and offered to light”

Few artists can draw inspiration from being part foreigner in a city that is both a lover and a killer, channeling this state of creative limbo into some form of trace in space and time. In his works for passion, created in the breaks between commissioned journalistic photographs, Magzan does precisely that – snatching darkness away from light and the light from darkness. Patiently and surrendering himself to the currents of fate, he awaits the motifs and moments in which he is able to condense his state and the rhythm of being into a photograph able to open up new dimensions in the consciousness of the observer. His photographic lens and recording of images are just an extension of his piercing eye and the curiosity with which he explores the possibility of leaving a trace in time, in order to find his bearings and position himself in relation to it.
The setting recorded in his photographs is the same one that he carries within himself, epitomizing a special sort of hunger for condensed documenting of reality, in order to capture, and feel, as much and as intensely as possible in the shortest amount of time. He aptly combines his photojournalistic experience with his artistic gaze, which, albeit raw and rough, easily unearths a new story in popular motifs. The light that leaves a thin mark of pixels on the photograph, just as the blackness and darkness that complete the motif, are simplified to the extent that even a human face becomes an abstract vestige of light that only takes shape in the echoes of the eye.

– Emil Matešić, art historian and curator