photographer Tomaž Gregorič
written by Igor Španjol

 

When I first saw the Mostec development it was an urban simulacrum; it did not really exist, but it was on billboards all over the town. That idealised architectural oasis was too schematic and unrecognisable; the billboard showed a future intervention into the bleak urban environment producing the effect of a kitsch collage. This effect of displacement, however, is not the brainchild of computer-generated advertising photography. Simulation and the coexistence of the avant-garde and kitsch – where formal differences no longer entail differences in meaning – have long been common in contemporary art. Moreover, not even nature is what it used to be, as one could see this winter; grass was a dash too green in the Ljubljana parks. For Tomaž Gregorič, it was the central problem in making the series of photographs published in this issue: the weather was “not depressing enough”.