Pavol Macho prefers working with sheet glass by forming and deforming it in its hot state, and this enables him to create reversible paintings – reliefs, picture–objects. One can walk around them, look at them from both sides, since each side reveals a different image of the painted work. It not only depends on the degree and kind of pigmenting, on applying the primer, on the painting of the inside and the surface, but also on the transparency, the absorption and the radiation of light through colour, as well as on outer luminous effects changing the picture’s relief. Macho makes an ingenious use of both transparent and opaque colours, using metal, lustre, matt and brilliance, as well as the division of the sheet into transparent and non-transparent parts. The fact that by melting, Macho joins several layers of painterly treated glass finished in a simple line drawing, both inside and on the surface, endows his picture-objects with a relief character, a depth, and an illusion of creating the inner space, which is in fact real.
Katarina Bajcurova
Director of Slovak National Gallery