The Renaissance building of a former mill on Upper Street in Modra is a place where the exhibition of photographs by the well-known photographer Vladimír Čuvala can be seen until June 30, 2018. It is called On Three Angels and documents the transformation of wood into sculpture.

The sculptures of the three angels were made from linden wood by the academic sculptors Marcela and Viliam Loviškovci

In particular, the focus is on the three angel sculptures created from linden wood by the academic sculptors, the couple Marcela and Viliam Loviškovci. And Vladimír Čuvala took this work as his personal photographic project. With his camera he became part of their work at the birth of the angels. His photographs reveal a behind-the-scenes view, the sculptors’ honest work, light, colors, shadows, shapes, and even scents. Over six months—from March to August 2012—he documented the metamorphosis of three linden trees, each over eighty years old, into three angels. From carving the wood to transport to the final destination. After six months, in the studio of the Loviškovci couple, a triptych measuring 8, 7, and 5 meters was created and installed in a public space in the village of Stožok. That is where the linden wood also comes from. From where it came, it returned there in the form of three sculptures. All this is captured in around a thousand photographs, from which visitors at the exhibition will see thirteen large-format ones. The fourteenth— a poster— presents a mosaic of the portraits themselves and images from the creation of the sculptures.

The exhibition presents the birth of the sculptures in two lines. In addition to documenting the work on the statues, the other object of the photographs is sculptor Viliam Loviška. “His face fit exactly into my idea of photographing so-called environmental portraits,” Vladimír Čuvala explains his intention. “I wanted to photograph a person in his natural environment, one that is close to him, where he feels at home. Someone striking yet ordinary, someone who has achieved something in life, who is a professional in his field. The important thing was the spark in the eyes, love for the work being made, enthusiasm and passion. And for me as a photographer that embodied the academic sculptor Viliam Loviška.”

The photographs were made in afternoon and early evening hours up to sunset. The reason was the quality of light. “Photographing such a project in the middle of the day would be demanding. It would have been difficult for me to get close enough to the required quality of illumination using flash. Photographing in the evening offered a broad range of possibilities—from shooting in natural light to using flashes.”

To prove that one can capture the same object over six months without the photographer repeating himself is indeed very challenging. Vladimír Čuvala, however, managed to do this. Shots were created with flash, without flash, with a telephoto lens. At times he focused on the whole then on details. Even while photographing, the scaffolding fulfilled a certain purpose—it created photos from a bird’s-eye perspective.

In addition to shots of work on the sculptures and portraits of Viliam Loviška, the exhibition also includes photographs of academic sculptor Marcela Lovišková, who likewise contributed to the creation of the sculptures. To make the exhibition complete, curator Lea Lovišková decided to finish it in an unconventional way—places on it were also taken up by frottages taken from the angel sculptures: “It is an artistic technique for copying the relief structure onto paper. The frottages map the chisel’s touch, the carving on each statue.” Visitors can admire five large-format images, two of classic size and two more in which there are five frottages each.

Vladimír Čuvala comes from Modra, where he grew up and still lives. He began photographing in 1996. He first achieved success in photographic competitions. His portfolio contains images for magazines, report shots from expeditions to the Alps and Africa. He photographed nature, landscapes, portraits, and contributed to calendars and tourist guides. He gradually expanded his range to include stock photography as well. Today, his published photographs number in the hundreds across dozens of books, newspapers, magazines, and calendars. Besides Slovakia and the Czech Republic, he has also published in distant countries such as China, India, Japan, Canada, and the USA.

Author: Mária Mišovičová The author is the editor of the magazine Prohuman Photo: Vladimír Čuvala