ABOUT

   from the pen of an ethnologist and cultural anthropologist  – written by Noel Šuran in August 2022

                 I met Valter Černeka from Banjole ten years ago at the Seven Days of Creation art festival in Pazin. 7DC took place through a series of workshops, educational content and performances, conceived as a platform for joint artistic work and creativity where the final product is presented first in the community where it was created, and then in a wider area. I remember one of his lithographic graphic sheets from the “Šenji” cycle, which was created experimentally – when cutting salami on a lithographic stone. We were still students then, he studied at the Venetian Academy and I at the Academy in Rijeka. Today, with some distance, I try to contextualize his graphic opus, which I called Semiotics of everyday life – man – house – landscape.

Valter perceives artistic elements all around him (for example, while preparing lunch, building in the yard, fishing.). It can be said that he is forever searching for a sign, because as he himself points out, “all the actions that surround us must have some sign, some appearance”.

He actually tries to materialize that sign.

Around him, he notices various objects, discarded things, food remains (fish scales, bones of common sole, eel gills or lobster antennas), plants (fig leaves, mandarin oranges, vines, olive trees, loquat…), animals (olive fruit fly, bark beetles, scale insect, cuttlefish…) which he transfers to the matrix, etches and then prints.

His graphic oeuvre can be seen as a kind of diary of everyday signs, artistic impressions or human traces that he sensibly perceives and tries to record or document in some way. He achieves this best through traditional graphic techniques (intaglio printing: etching, aquatint, vernis mou; flat printing: lithography, linocut and woodcut). We can say that the matrix is extremely important to the artist, it is an object that remembers, that contains something important and valuable, a kind of “reliquary”.

He also collects ethnographic objects, which for him have spiritual value in addition to aesthetic value. Often these objects become matrices (for example billhook, spears, demijohn…). When it comes to his relationship to the matrix, he points out that: “the approach is sculptural, each of them is a separate and special object that can also be used as a matrix. By mixing these matrices, I get an unlimited number of possibilities to create a picture, a visual document”.

He does not perceive graphics as a technique of reproduction, but as an analog tool that records direct traces of human everyday life and direct intervention. For an artist, printmaking is a medium that provides him with the full possibility of expression, and graphic techniques have immense creative possibilities, while at the same time they are complex and demanding. It is necessary to have a lot of knowledge and experience in order to make quality graphic sheets.

Valter likes to experiment both with motifs and with technique and materials, but he is very fond of graphic métier, a high level of perfection in technical execution is visible. His graphics are aesthetically elaborate, precise, refined, and at the same time experimental. Most often, they are in color, matrices with the same dimensions of 20 x 20 cm, which allows him various combinatorics when printing, “you can get different effects in the visual impression from the same matrix. It’s one thing if it’s black and white, and quite another if it’s in color.”

In addition to experimenting with matrices, he also experiments with the graphic technique itself, but also with color. For example, cypress pollen is used instead of resin in the aquatint technique, his matrices are etched by crabs, etc. In the preparation of paint, he uses natural earth oxides and chemical elements and compounds such as sulphur, lime, soil, ash, cement, which he mixes in different proportions together with beeswax/pork fat/turpentine and obtains distinctive natural tones.

For etching iron matrices, he uses table salt and copper sulfate. He is actually a perfectionist who plays like a little child, and at the same time he is also a botanist, chemist, biologist…

Černeka plays with matrices and creates a peculiar visual world, which is often critical because it talks about the recent problems of the Istrian landscape, the change of the landscape due to accelerated urbanization, the problem of sustainability in the context of mass tourism, pollution – the attitude towards garbage, etc. Space is very important in Valter’s artistic preoccupations: “the concept of space has always intrigued me. Space indirectly has a great influence on our essence, on what we can become. Every society creates its own places and there we are all free artists in a way. The process of creating a painting is long, slow and layered, and although sometimes objects are shown clearly, my intention is that their appearance takes on a semiotic aspect, so that all individual elements of the composition or frame, spots and lines, can be isolated and observed separately. If abstraction is one of the fundamental thought processes, then this is a story about the identity of a landscape and the individual who lives in it”.