When the painter’s vision unveils the membrane of the immediate surface, which shatters each emphasised meaning in the already presented event, we enter symbolic space. Here meanings attached to the painting and our own “reading” peel away. Now true viewing and reading begins; without masks, exaggerated articulations. Symbolic reading, this microscopic work, dispels the optical illusion, as it combines, like a mirror, all the segments of sight and the art of painting into a new, “upturned” whole.

The external visibility of the paintings is therefore (only) the necessary clair-obscure that leads us deeper into the sensitive, sensuous, spasmodic body wherein pleasure begins. Paintings and images are erogenous points that enable approximation, enable us to cast off our prejudices and give in, allow us to enter without censorship the images in which the accidental observer sees and (post)- names himself. Poetic weaving is by no means instrumental, therefore those, who cannot or do not want to follow it, are bereft of all pleasure in viewing. To them, symbolic order is (merely) a mystification, or they reject it, for conformity’s sake, as criterion of artistic value. It therefore depends on our Viewing-Reading whether we will understand the artistic image correctly – appropriately.

Art of painting/the painting is the touch of the human – poet’s hand … animal paws and the soul, which is “vocation” and “event” in Badiou’s sense, happening and “appropriation” (as Er-reignis), the acting and giving of the visual artistic script: as a character and sign of the body (Leib) from – the author’s – skin and complexion. That is, a sign, semeion mega: a great sign of his sadness and happiness. The great sign de l‘animalité of the human soul as psyche, which guides the hand in uncovering hell and the bright, moveable, multifaceted zoomorphic and anthropomorphic primordial shapes and unconscious “forms” in the gardens of Eden. Painting = the uncertain sharp boundary between humanity and animality of experiencing and experience: logique de la sensation, that is the logic of feeling, “omniscience”, omnipresence of some sensation, which is not only of the poet/painter as l’homme, man, but derives from the whole of all that is alive and all living beings and plants, and rocks, that is zoomineralogy and all manner of geography, which is inhabited by the poet’s anima as vis elastic, as fertility and “engendering” into the final and infinite placelesness of the painting, visual artistic Script.

Into the human animalic freedom, as liberation and pure responsibility to the internal and external world, which is inhabited with each painting by the poet as sujet barré, that is simultaneously restricted and also recurrently liberated, personal and in the same instance cosmogonic, caught in eternal archetypical and “spasmodic” instance, which lends him power and an all-encompassing, all-worldly primordial memory in the game of visual and stylistic rhythms. Rhythms of Heaven and Hell that form the inception and passing – the transience of the painting… his birth and “nullification”.

Narcissus in the mirror: Poet as Painter… His paintings and image unions are a lasting metaphorical phantasm, which is led by Time as the cruel, ruthless-though-just, all-worldly, and redeeming aion, which adjudicates and judges and punishes all and all manner of sloth, vanity, despair, and despondency… and sinful co-dependence and ab-sence… in (a single and/or deadly) chess move on the platter of (chess) plateia. Art is like a magic cave (“Open, Sesame”), behind it, behind the hymen of the wall with the entrance, behind the apparitional wall of the visual artistic image, is the fundamental artistic – artist’s “thing” as the essence of the artwork, which is sought and explored only by the poet, artist. Bernard would say that he is looking for the final painting of paintings, the last painted image, to which he is driven by his drive, instinct, “driving force” as Triebfeder, that is by the internal “spring” of instinctual drive that leads to the final act.

Between the fingers holding the pencil, the hand is like a moti(vati)on onto itself, that is an automatic motion, like a drive that now and always guides the artist’s hand. Which is in actuality that and also already the artist’s hand. In the fold of the hand and the pencil between the fingers is erotica as Eros and Geschlecht (species, genus, and sex and sexuality, genealogy), which is actually sexual motion, a crease and fold, movement and contact with the white sheet of paper, erotic swing from here to there, from outside inwards, and from inside again – outwards…

Andrej Medved

Info:

CONTEMPORARY SLOVENIAN PAINTING: THE THIRD GENERATION
artists: Suzana Brborović, Ira Niero Marušič, Maruša Šuštar, Nika Zupančič
curator: Andrej Medved
12 December 2019 – 19 January 2020
Pilonova galerija Ajdovščina
Prešernova ulica 3,
5270 Ajdovščina
pilonova.galerija@siol.net
www.venopilon.com