Laco Teren’s exhibition at the Rona Gallery in the grounds of the mansion in Lednické Rovnie presents two specific areas of his current work: ceramics and glass painting (in collaboration with Patrik Illo). Here we meet again the painter Laco Teren (1960), who recently added glass and majolica to his wide range of interests, more precisely he started drawing and painting on them. However, he did not understand them only as different and at the same time special bases – matter and technology of their kind, but he tried to grasp them as a whole, as objects determined by the unity of function, utility and – beauty.
As Laco Teren says, he likes to do everything he doesn’t understand. In 2017, at the invitation of glassmaker Patrik Illo, today the chief designer of the glassworks in Lednické Rovnie, he participated in the Rona 2017 International Glass Symposium, where they made several works together. The initiator of the collaboration was Patrik Illo (1973), a respected designer, visual artist and pedagogue. In the utilitarian collections of Illo table and drinking glassware, it is based on respect for functionality, purpose, and applies a minimalist form, which is characterized by the internal monumentality and generosity of the shape and the elegance of clean lines. Technologically, it is mainly focused on the so-called however, he often combines smooth cup material, clear blown glass with a metallurgically shaped colored detail. Although the interplay of utility and aesthetic function is primary for him, mastering the given glass technology, he sometimes does not hesitate to go “to the limit”, so to speak, experimenting with proportions, slender and elongated stems, deviation of the center of gravity, with the kinetic effect – the lability and stability of the object or with a decorative detail that has a narrative or poetic meaning. Patrik created several types of glass containers for Lac – vases, jugs and drinking glasses, which his friend typically – and with his own lightness and playfulness – completed with a brush and paint. Common, somewhat detached works and parts were created for all those who like and can appreciate the magic of glass.
In 2019, to his “useful” experiments, Laco Teren added a trip to Modra, to paint majolica, a traditional faience that was once brought to Slovakia by masters from Habana. In Slovak Folk Ceramics, he started painting vessels based on traditional recipes in cooperation with local masters and experts. He thus joined those free artists who tried to work with ceramic materials, glazes and colors, as well as with glass, did not disdain utilitarian shapes, were able to connect the apparently low with the high… On glass and majolica, you can find the entire sample list that Laco Teren he created for his containers: extremely strong, free of color, expressive “signs in motion” parade before us (like a memory of the “wild eighties”…), fragments of human faces and heads, omnipresent eyes that follow you wherever you move, magical beings, still lifes on which all kinds of painted things and oddities come to life, inherent flowers in their full beauty and blossoming, a moment before withering…
These motifs, symbols and signs have been traveling through his work for quite some time: from the proverbial drawings, “scribbles” – to paintings, from paintings to graphics and vice versa, most recently he covers the walls with them with wit and lightness characteristic of himself – shards of ceramic and glass containers, vases or plates. They are thrown with the proverbial pleasure, sometimes with special respect for detail, other times quite easily, with an effort to capture the essence with one melodically supple and undulating line. They always adapt a little to the given medium, even transform, but their essence remains the same – playful and joyful. In order for Teren’s (and Illo’s) glass and ceramic vessels to please you, they had to be born from the earth, because siliceous sand and ceramic clay have the same, common essence, to go through not only the head, eye and hand of the artist, but especially fire, until fire published joint results, containers that are – not only – beautiful…
Katarína Bajcurová
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