A Manual for Silence

Size 17 × 24 cm
Pages 112
Plates 64
Edition 300 copies

Concept Rene Maurin, Matej Dečko
Design Matej Dečko
Year 2019
Publisher City of Maribor / Studio at the Elephant / Studio Maurin / Generator

A Manual for Silence is an ongoing series of vivid, colourful images featuring encounters that are, in one way or another, willing to share and explore their intimacy and identity rooted in the reduction of the narrative. The images employ straightforward portraiture bordering on – perhaps toying, with mundane iconography.

The aim was never to express privacy via obvious and easily legible language. The images sometimes hide petite parables, assembled from the shards of subjects lives or memories, wrapped in the cellophane of an ancient language. In other cases they are merely modest games of visual elements lacking serious premeditation, urging us to posteriorly inquire for a signification. What, however, binds them is an attempt to observe and employ a semiosis of a visual langue eluding or abusing convention. A gaze into a langue that perhaps cannot tell the whole truth, thus neither fully lie nor mislead. They simply yearn to rearrange the mundane into something we can't live without – a sense of identity, expression, and poof of singularity.

The book exposes the images to text that conjures images by beleaguering the unspoken – pasting words and sentences onto the invisible substance until it reveals a faint wireframe of the narrative. Perhaps there – behind this impediment, the existence of it all is to be found. In the failed correspondence of mumbling planes and shards of breached conventions. In the imminent erosion of understanding, solely a silent touch can soothe.

From Artist's Website.