Cyril Blažo & Martin Kochan

Pub art

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Pub Art is a selection of free drawings by Cyril Blažo and Martin Kochan, created jointly in recent years in pubs and bars mainly in Trnava, where Kochan lives and Blažo, his former tutor, teaches at the university’s Pedagogical Faculty. The pub art drawings, initially caricatures, came about by a spontaneous chain sketching of their shared ideas. Often they are derived from authentic themes of the pub setting (beer, restaurant food, toys in the children’s corner, TV weather, sport etc.) and these are developed in sarcastic registers, parodying, for example, the sociopolitical situation and the social themes Blažo and Kochan had just been discussing while drinking their beer or Kofola. Later they employed a similar principle for interventions on reproductions, making entire art books which take inspiration from found absurd connections. The oversketching of prints (in annuals and publications devoted to hunting, safari, bodybuilding and culture) develops unexpected ideas ‒ often the most commonplace ideas! ‒ on how the captured static moment may further evolve. Via newly-created geometrical relationships, the figures of drunks, sportsmen, banal women, and very often allegorised animals, arrive at stalemate situations. But even the darkest images of vanity and greed turn into an ingenious joke, which is Cyril’s weapon in the fight against culture and Martin’s in the fight for culture. 

 

Mira Keratová