- Publisher: Slovenska matica
- 205 pages
- Author: Miklavž Komelj
- Original title: Zagledal sem se sredi dveh ozvezdij: Veno Pilon med podobo in besedo
Slovenska matica published Veno Pilon’s autobiography, On the Edge, back in 1965, while in 2022 it paid its tribute to this great artist with a monograph, I Came to See Myself Between Two Star Constellations: Veno Pilon Between the Picture and the Word, which presents Veno Pilon by pictures and by words with an utmost comprehensiveness, i.e. not only as a painter and photographer, but also as a poet, essayist and a subtle thinker. The commenting texts and selections of Pilon’s paintings, essays and poems have been prepared by two prominent specialists in his life and work, dr. Irena Marija Mislej and dr. Miklavž Komelj. They envisaged the book as an intertwining of unique essays on Pilon’s life stretching across his native Slovenia, Paris and other European cities, with his work, which reflects a restless creative mind. The book brings Pilon’s most representative essays, while his poems, for the first time in such a large number, can also be read. The texts are completed by numerous full-page reproductions of his paintings and photographs as well as smaller reproductions accompanying the texts as intertextual vignettes.
Miklavž Komelj
Miklavž Komelj (b. 1973) is a poet, writer, essayist, translator and art historian. He has published several books of poetry, prose works, a verse drama, books for children, and some scholarly and essayist works. He also translates from different languages (including Juana Inés de la Cruz, Petar Petrović Njegoš, Fernando Pessoa, César Vallejo, Djuna Barnes, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alejandra Pizarnik). He has had three solo painting exhibitions. He has edited Collected Poems by Jure Detela, and two books of previously uncollected Srečko Kosovel’s writings, Let Me Be Unknown to All. Slovenska matica has published his debut novel, Cover Me, Snow.
Irene Mislej (b. 1946 in Buenos Aires to Slovenian parents) attended a Spanish and English primary school, and graduated from a grammar school, Colego nacional de Vicente Lopez, in 1963. She studied journalism and radio broadcasting, and art history in Buenos Aires. She contributed to different newspapers as a journalist. After returning to Slovenia in 1978, she first lived in Ljubljana, where she earned a PhD in art history in 1987 at the Faculty of Arts, and was then the head of Pilon Gallery of Ajdovščina for eighteen years, organising his art estate, researching his opus as well as work by his contemporaries, evaluating his correspondence and publishing parts of it. She concluded her expert gallery work as a senior curator. She also researched Pilon’s family tree and edited the memories given by his son and others testifiers. She put up exhibitions of his opus, both in Pilon’s home gallery and in other institutions, and she participated in a retrospective exhibition of his work in Ljubljana Modern Gallery and in his anthology exhibitions in Italy, France and Austria.
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