Štefan Papčo | Floating Mountain
Guest: Maria Bartuszová
Curated by Silvia Van Espen
Opening 28 Nov, 5 – 9 pm
Galerie POGGI, Paris, France

Štefan Papčo’s exhibition (born in 1983) presents a group of works from the Absolut series (2017), the sculptures Becoming, Fifth Step (2024) and Through Two Slabs (2017), as well as in situ drawings. It explores the zones of encounter between gravity and elevation, matter and consciousness, the visible and the invisible. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition at Galerie Poggi in Paris.

Sculptures such as Bonekan or Anorak (from the Absolut series), cast in bronze, evoke the suspended presence of an absent body: empty garments that retain the memory of a gesture, a posture, a breath held still. Through these anthropomorphic forms, Papčo questions the tension between envelope and interiority, between the trace of the living and its disappearance. In Through Two Slabs, glass and fiberglass play on transparency and fracture, placing the sculpture within a transitional zone between materiality and erasure. As for Becoming, Fifth Step, carved in granite and iron, it condenses mineral density and the slowness of the sculptural gesture : weight becomes almost meditative, a point of balance between effort and surrender.

Through this intimate relationship with nature and the elements, Papčo situates himself within an artistic lineage in which sculpture transcends its materiality to become a meeting point between physical and mental space. Inspired by Robert Smithson’s Site/Nonsite dialectic, he brings into the exhibition space fragments of lived experiences from his wanderings in the mountains, forests, or extreme alpine environments — each work becoming the imprint of an inner dialogue with the landscape. His sculptures are at once a recording of a unique moment in time and an act of participation. The “antigravity” he evokes is not a denial of the physical presence of matter : it is a suspension of time, a fragile moment of equilibrium in which matter seems to breathe — a form of listening to the world and to oneself.

In this exhibition, sculpture becomes a site of delicate balance between the tangible and the immaterial, a contemplation of matter within the void.

Guest artist : Maria Bartuszová
The works of Maria Bartuszová (Germination I, 1966, and Dandelion Seeds, 1970–72) enter into dialogue with those of Štefan Papčo through their sensitive approach to form and lightness. Their organic volumes, created in bronze or aluminum, explore fragility as a generative principle. In Bartuszová’s work, as in Papčo’s, sculpture seems to aspire to dissolution — to that moment when matter, traversed by breath, becomes almost immaterial.