Lojze Perko, Factory Utok, 1954, o.pl.

In the 1950s, more precisely in 1954, the work of the academic painter Lojze Perko (1909-1980) was created, which depicts the Utok factory in Kamnik, when it was nationalized and expanded tremendously from the once small private leather factory of Tone Knaflič. Perko designed the picture from the courtyard side. In the background, we can see that the buildings are not yet completely built. The diagonal layout of the storage rooms is additionally varied with the famous tall chimney. Tanners are shown unloading animal skin in the yard. Due to the way the sky is treated, the painting acquires a dramatic touch, otherwise this and similar works could also be considered socialist realist painting, a socialist realist genre in which a new ideal was placed on a pedestal – the depiction of work, factories, a new structure that builds a new man. Of course, works similar to these were also the most numerous. Authors such as Perko, however, tackled them in a strictly artisanal manner, to order, as we know that the landscape, which Lojze Perko mainly devoted himself to at the time, was a rather underrated genre. As an accomplished artist, even with the present motif, he succeeds in conjuring that characteristic state that branches out from his landscapes and is expressed in this place in the stormy sky.