Olivier Kaeppelin
THE LIGHT OF THE STORM

(...)

Criss-crossing his own fantasies as well as those of art and literature, which he enthusiastically appropriates, Marko Velk nonchalantly draws us into a vision of a world where we move around as ghosts, from one hallucination to the next. He deploys subterfuge by way of which he diverts images gleaned from current events to the black and white world of engraving, the grey of X-rays into a paradox of ancient figures more revealing of the times we are living through than all of social networks’ non-stop bombardments.

If we recognise a fragment of a particular work, it is never an intimation or a reference, for it has been integrated, “devoured” as it were by its drawing, which brings it back to life as a grafted element, incarnated in a new body, namely that of its composition.

This sensation of images being engulfed, swallowed as it were by another, is all the more impressive given that Marko Velk, just like the filmmaker Roberto Longo, knows how to avail of every “fashion”, every style with astonishing skill, all in the service of a synthetic imagination that allows itself the greatest precision of drawing as well as the freest gestural expressions, cast into space in pursuit of the optimal intensity.

Marko Velk stops at nothing. His mental constellation is one of daring constructions in which heterogeneous moments and forms come together within one and the same figure. Though these may originate in the animal or vegetable, mineral or human worlds, they do belong to the same body at the moment of their appearance. More than the expression of free association, they stem from a free incarnation. Their truth has nothing to do with authoritarian logic. On the contrary, they favour the chimeras which, with surprising rigour, impose their sense of what is “real”, their modus pensandi. A strange horseman thus carries off his booty on an inimitable Rossinante, a “monster-form” made as much of cloud as the cloud above it. Is this Don Quixote caught up in the patchwork of realms? In the “clearings” of a forest which is, above all, by means of charcoal and the charcoal drawings, the manifestation of the vital role played by form and space in Marko Velk’s oeuvre. And just like Edward Burne-Jones’ classical heroes, Velk’s “monster-form” eludes that space which beleaguers it.

The profound blackness of the lines, the glowing whiteness of the surfaces, the fragility of drawings’ facture, all confronts us with an apparition where nothing is unambiguous, where feelings of danger, of fear, of flight in the face of an indefinite threat, come to create an allegory of our times. By refusing to accept an authoritarian time, by dismissing the temporal hierarchies of the old and the new, or rather, by combining them, mixing them until they are reborn in a single time: the time inherent to the work, Marko Velk gradually shepherds us toward his home terrain.

(Complete text in the printed catalogue)