© Tono Stano
An exciting exhibition is opening very soon at the Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York. Tono Stano's series of haunting and surreal images are due to go on display from 2 February through to 17 March, 2012, marking the Slovakian photographer’s first solo show in the United States and features 20 unique gelatin silver prints from his ongoing series of surreal portraits, White Shadow.
With White Shadow, Stano seeks to turn reality negative, transporting the viewer to an inverted monochromatic realm. Produced in-camera, his photographs are analogue paper negatives that appear as positive representations through Stano’s meticulous and unique process of painting the white portions of his subjects’ bodies and faces black, and vice versa. When photographed in this fashion, that which is negative appears positive. The resulting images, which are graphically striking and seductively haunting, present a fusion of both the negative and positive. In this way, Stano is interested not only in the physical aspects of this negative/positive transformation, but also in "promoting this conversion as a life philosophy" according to the gallery's pr.
Since 1984, Stano’s work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions worldwide. His photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the National Media Museum, Bradford, England; and the Slovenská narodná galéria, Bratislava, Slovakia, among others.
