Inspiring Industry

It all started a few years ago. I was driving through Karviná to take some early evening shots of one endangered coal mine, when I got an incomming call from some unknown number with French prefix. That charming lady on the other end introduced herself as Marion Tivital, who apparently discovered the #beautyofsteel project and would like to make some paintings from my photographs. Of course I had nothing against, it is always a pleasure to help someone who finds my humble photographs useful. At that time I had no idea that I was talking to THAT Marion Tivital, a prominent French artist who is represented by the world's leading galleries. With her unique style, which reduces giant industrial buildings into minimalist geometric objects, she portrayted two Czech industrial sites - the iconic coking plant of the Koněv ironworks in Kladno and the ventilation pit no. 13 of Hamr uranium mine near Strá? pod Ralskem, which is long gone now.

  On the other side of the spectrum is artist Andrea Pompili from Roma, who expanded his portfolio of realistic watercolor paintings of traditional urban motives with several industrial themese inspired by my images from the USA, Italy and Russia.

A respected painter Claudio Cionini, a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Florence, also comes from Italy. His fascination with industry and the urban landscape has been accompanying him since his childhood - it is due to his hometown Grosseto, formerly surrounded by ore mines, and also the neighboring , now post-industrial, port of Piombino. And it were the paintings from Piombino that were on display at the collective exhibition 'Nuova pittori della realtà' (New Painters of Reality) in Milan, or at the exhibition 'RUST! Fabbrica-Città-Memoria '(Rust! Factory-City-Memory) in Pontedera. And thanks to its promotion on the instagram I discovered his paintings from Ukraine. He had no idea that they originated from my photographs, he just found them somewhere on the internet.

And speaking of Ukraine, I should not forget the beginning artist Sveta Shirkova from Kiev, who has never been to Donbass, but she made several acrylic paintings of my favorite shafts around Gorlovka and Yenakiieve.

But there is one painter who is clearly stepping out of this line, but also out of the contemporary art scene in general – Ond?ej Caska, a lawyer from Prague, Czech Republic. There are not many artists devoted to the Chinese ink paintings today and it is only Caska who unpretentiously combines traditional unrepeatable methods with purely urban and industrial motifs.

Fine brush strokes gave birth to, for example, a blast furnace department at the end of a flowing alley, in fact a much rougher-looking town of Dneprodzerzhinsk, or the last moments of the (in)famous sintering plant in Ostrava.

Besides the paintings I do sometimes, but very rarely, find my work on someone else's skin. Like this tattoo by Slovak artist Stano Tma.

It is not obvious to enter the mills, to travel freely and to visit places you would never take your children with for the holidays. It costs large amounts of money, nerves and time.  And if my pictures will help the true artists to focus on their new and breathtaking works in their calm and silent studios, instead of sweating on the top of the slag heap somewhere on the other side of the Earth, then I am absolutely fine with it.

The industry is beautiful. But it is also transitory.  And that is why this minor flash of steel in the great history of human race needs to be recorded by all available means. I chose my way already.  And you?

Which one is your favorite? And would you hang one of these on the wall? And what is your relationship towards art? And can industry be an art?

The czech version here.

Viktor Mácha (www.viktormacha.com), 2019