Stano Trepač
Although we know that a picture is a picture and a word is a word, we have always strived to clarify a painter’s or a sculptor’s visual message in words because words are closest to us, and this was also so in the beginning. Also music has been in our ears since the cradle.
Stano Trepač, about whom I wrote several years ago as a painter who does not like naming his pictures with words, is a remarkable introvert. Let this virtue serve him. He does not like talking about his pictures, which he paints with big passion. I do not wonder as this artist has gone through the serious field as restoration, knows what art is all about, he has touched history and knows its value. It is something like: “one who works hard, values the it’s worth”. And mostly it is valued by those who are able to work the hardest. Painting is Stano’s worth as well as his investment. As an introvert he has his understanding of the world, in which he communes with mysticism, history, the recent present, as well as with those many spins of life which each of us encounter, even though we do not want to accept them.
I can imagine him being a religious painter or a restorer of religious or secular paintings, one who solyes those puzzles, which are not generally accessible to the common public. Just because someone has a pencil, a pen or a paintbrush in their hand, does not mean that they are able to paint. However Stano Trepač is able to do that. Naturally he is not the only one. He is an individual, not an imitator; he paints despite the fact that he is not always understood. It is difficult for some to understand others while they are not even able to understand their closest ones. Art has never been about being understood by all. Observers, who claim that they are not touched by this, are mistaken. Hasn’t man been addressed by the Agnus Dei in the Christian world for centuries? Hasn’t man bowed to Him with meekness and desire purification? Hasn’t he been presented with an altar, a table as a symbol where family and friends meet?
Again and again it is necessary to return to the layers of one’s memory and to search through them. Not only coal mined out of the depths of the Earth heats us.
Memory heats us, too and “a restorer of human memory” as he was called by Ludo Petránsky, junior has not only been present through exhibitions in the capital city of the Slovak Republic, but also on a larger scale. And to exhibit means to a certain extent to boast - about this gift.
The Ancient Greeks already knew that a gift is a means of payment. It means something valuable.
Rudolf Čižmárik