Igor Benca — Searchers in the Land of the Missing VI

The graphic artist Igor Benca created a collection of graphic prints as a part of the representative bibliophilic publication that was published by the Nitra Gallery under the title The Searchers in the Land of the Missing in 1995. Benca’s colour deep prints were inspired by the poetic works of Igor Hochel, the poet, literary critic, Nitra citizen. Thus the two intellectual minds from Nitra met in this artistic work and in their emotive and authentic vision of the world melted in words and images reflecting on their own search and discovery of the endogenic world though their own experience but also through the experience of previous generations; the search in never ending spaces of consciousness and emotion, in the land that makes us wonder by the simplicity of facts and vast spaces of its undiscovered internal energy that are all united in a being called human.

Igor Benca, a pupil of Albín Brunovský, innovated his graphic prints with a new form. He opened the closed, simple, right-angled frame of the graphic print into the outside space and thus made its form more dynamic. The area of drawing lines from the inside of the painting is also followed by the outline of the picture frame. It is not self-serving because it comes out of the whole composition of the artwork that is geometrically divided. They are characterized by simplicity of form and individual technique. He uses not only archetypes but also a very cultivated dreamy colour scale evoking mysterious atmosphere.