Artwork of the month:
Tono Stano — Illusion & In the Dark

Tono Stano is one of the most important photographers of his generation. He demonstrated his talent already at secondary school under the guidance of a special photographer Milota Havránková. In the 1980s he entered FAMU in Prague as one of the Slovak New Wave: “There he soon formed a successful group of Slovak students who drew attention to themselves by many differences from the Czech environment. The contemplative and existential atmosphere of black-and-white photography in Bohemia was etched with playfulness, eroticism and irony, and the related spontaneous dynamics of the image. “¹

Unrestraint, playfulness, imagination and eroticism have defined the signature of Tono Stano’s classic analogue black and white photographs for several decades. A characteristic aspect of his work is the perfection and beauty of the female body – openness and mystery at the same time.

As an artist he has never slowed down, he is constantly pushing himself, looking for and also finding new opportunities and inspirations. He doesn’t let himself be shackled, he likes to “get drunk” with beauty and creativity. Concepts of artistic ideas, staged scenarios of his works come in the lonely silence of the author’s own inexhaustible imagination. Despite the clear idea of the final work – the concept – he does not consider the search as an imperfection or failure, but as a path to further and new ideas.

The black and white analogue photography on archival paper – the work Illusion I – was created in 2002 and bears all the typical features of the artist’s manuscript – the possibilities of the human body, light and shadow, the fulfilment of the concept and, finally, the perfect result. The female body – a nude – arranged according to a clear artistic idea forces the model herself to a considerable amount of superhuman performance, which the artist does not let herself be limited by. The photograph evokes several illusory possibilities – the illusion of hanging or levitation (the model hangs or levitates), the illusion of supporting or walking (the naked woman supports herself or “walks”), the illusion of support or disablement (does she support or hinder the model in her endeavours)? Humour is intertwined with artistic creation.

The staged photographs of the female body in the studio – a pair of works In the Dark I and In the Dark II – capture the artistic beauty of the naked female body in a lightened stylization. In dark shades, a nude female body shrouded in darkness yet exposed, with the visual emphasis focused on the light source or light cone itself. 

Photographer Tono Stano, with his distinctive imagination and typical work, has long since far exceeded the Central European region from which he emerged and has become one of the distinctive personalities of the art world. In the same way, Tono Stano’s feeling of “unexceptional photographer” has been growing over the years and transcends not only the boundaries of the medium of photography – the labyrinths of possibilities, strange feelings, the possibilities of the process of creation and the search for the medium that best corresponds to the author’s own imagination transcend the established notions and definitions of our artistic environment.

The Nitra Gallery purchased three classic photographic works by the artist in 2023 thanks to the Fund for the Support of Art. Let’s see what it could be next time…