Trains

You don’t have to build model trains in order to appreciate this bold representation of digital train spotting. Branislav Kropilak’s preference for technical and industrial motifs has been well known for a long time. Now he emerges as a connoisseur of assembled ghost trains. The trains that we see have never actuallycrossed these landscapes, because these landscapes never really existed. Everything in the images has been pieced together, like a train itself. Rail by rail, the landscape was laid into the picture format.

The references to the model trains as exibited on shelves of model railroad-enthusiats are unmistakable, and the ghost train and fictional landscape realism doesn’t fail to impress. That is because the artificial has been carefully hidden behind the copy and reproduction of the real. There are numerous traces that mysteriously blur the assemblage, or even make it disappear: almost like a clever paradox. Kropilak grounds the character of the model railroad in reality.

Stephan Reisner


Geometric Visions

Utopia is a place where positive visions become reality. If Branislav Kropilak’s photographs have an inclination to the Utopian, as he himself says, then he is not in fact interested in the near or distant future: he convincingly documents the aesthetics of the here and now.

Branislav Kropilak’s works show how modern technology shapes the environment and human life. The precisely executed, large-format works reveal a positive disposition toward technology as well as a joy in geometry, in the radiance of complex apparatus, and in the aura of functional space.

The photographer is able to capture a connection to geometry’s design principles through his unusual and highly analytical view of house-high, multi-pieced billboards. He is not interested in the messages they hope to convey but rather only in the medium’s construction, which he reduces in his clever compositions, viewed from below, to the basic forms of triangle, circle, and square.

Other defining traits of Kropilak’s images are the central perspective and the exact representation of nighttime lighting effects, which he never portrays with sentimental intentions. It is absolute clarity for which these pictures strive. This clarity situates the images in the aesthetic tradition of European and North American landscape and architecture photography – which has aimed since the 1970s to provide grand overviews of the organization of human life and, above all, to represent and interpret its technical aspects.

Horst Kloever