Ján Ondrejka
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Ján Ondrejka (b. 1977) is a Slovakian photographer.
Interested in photography from childhood he undertook specialised camera studies in secondary school, attending a school in Bratislava for this purpose. He graduated in 2002 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Slovak abbr.: VŠVU), Department of Photography and New Media, studio of Milota Havránková.
He found work as a cameraman’s assistant at Slovak Television, quickly rising to camera operator. He ran the gamut of the cameraman’s work, from shooting in the news studio to filming documentaries for classical film material. The high point of his television work was shooting a documentary on the surrealist painter Oldřich Majda, whose studio in Devin, close to Sandberg, is a unique affair. Ondrejka found a way to light under the complicated conditions of the sand cave, and thus to record the magic of Majda’s surrealism.
After a year in television, Ján Ondrejka decided to improve himself with further study, at the Bratislava VŠVU, in studio arts.
[edit] Works
Right from the start, he began using the language of symbols, which was to become the constant in his subsequent creations. In one of his first works, “Súvislosti” (English: “Connections”) in 1998, he drew in sand the symbols of two significant painters, Pablo Picasso and Jean Dubufet. In “Identita” (“Identity”) in 1999, he projected ancient Germanic rune writings on naked bodies. He combined modern and ancient symbols in “Introspekcia” (“Introspection”) in 1999. In “Posolstvo” (“Message”) from 2000 he used Plato’s allegory of the cave, by which the external reality is projected via shadows on the wall. In the “Duch” (“Ghost”) cycle of 2000, Ondrejka had symbols of some non-material character projected on the wall, an attempt to express the biblical concept of in the beginning was the word. The cycle moves into the abstract of coloured surfaces, inspired by the painter Mark Rothko. Ondrejka next moved into luminography, drawing symbols with light. In “Záhady” (“Mysteries”) in 2001 he layered spiral and maze symbols. Ondrejka concluded his experiments with the thesis work “Fakt a fikcia” (“Fact and Fiction”) in 2002, a set of diptychs of identical photographs, in which one differs from the other by the use of a symbol. The whole work was installed in a room of test tubes, on the bottom of which different objects were photographed.
