In defense of painting and sculpture
Marko Košan
Increasingly frequent juxtapositions of artistic creativity on both sides of slowly disappearing border between Austria and Slovenia, also including Croatian neighbors, persistently nears and completes the related historical and cultural space. In a common dialogue they are responding to a number of topical issues at a time when - as is seems - contemporary artist in the expanded field of intangible and no longer easily identifiable areas of visual arts moved away from métier paradigm of "nice" art and turned into a quasi-scientist, researcher with the help of sophisticated electronic and digital media, detects, registers, classifies, systematize and maps the most banal debris of everyday life. "Imagemakers" with a brush, a piece of canvas or paper, chisel and a wooden block should therefore belong to species just bound to extinction which conservatively bows to the feeling of survived values of classical painting and sculpture media.
Dare Birsa, Đanino Božić, Mario Dalpra, Richard Kaplenig, Dušan Kirbiš and Manfred Mörth are the artists following the foundamentals of (post) modernist painting and "solid-state" sculpture, but they don’t succumb to a tautology of sampling and vacated aestheticism of (usually abstract) image. Just the opposite – they’re always questioning the effectiveness and scope of its addressing, sensitively testing the new, different, even non-traditional technical procedures while pursuing a clear, existentially experienced interpretation of seemingly chaotic, but in fact carefully deliberate widespread associative network of mental art elements, symbols and signs. Heterogeneous visual languages of each individual creator of the ad-hoc, for the exhibition project consisting PH6 artistic group of friends, reflect six suggestive art worlds, interwoven in the total organism of liberated art limited only by iconic status of an image captured in rounded pictorial field. Therefore, touching the key problem of the mission of contemporary art at the time when the electronically created visual digital records and conceptual practice of some kind of simplified sociological interpretations of everyday life intrusive supplant the traditional, in the long centuries of development of art tested and in modernism from the pop world emancipated painted image. In this context, their paintings and sculptures are a kind of manifesto - probably it would be excessive if described as a protest - against the prevailing modes of visual art, fashionably turned away from classical painting, thus moving artistic expressions in to so-called virtual, electronically generated worlds ... as if the tangible earthly world and the emotional experience of the unconscious perception of all forms of life and the surrounding environments, suddenly no longer offers any challenge.
The exhibition pH6 can therefore be understood as unpretentious conspiracy to justify the image as a timeless institution concentrated in the tip of the brush or chisel leaving a trail and cut in wood or stone, thus actively addressing the viewer - to pause, to enjoy, consider and reflects in respond; although only for a moment in the flash of visual sensation, dips in the accumulated texture of an image, where the stranded deposits of time traces wattling merging to a fine membrane of mental scars of the highly individual and intimate experience of the artist, so that he feels the image as a medium of artistic growth, which - and this is the wonderful contradiction significant only to art - all the more imaginary far more is real.
During the period of the last ten years after the millennium, the art practice was oriented in conceptualism, where merely the orientation in the exploration of appearances counts. However man has in two millennia made filament of the civilized conception of the world and the cosmos centered on the humanistic principles that their view of man focus again to the man himself and his ability of spiritual empathy in sublime utterances of creation. The individual in-depth dialogue between the artist and the artistic flow of the visible world is therefore an unfinished story - elusive, intriguing and never quite and fully explained
The exhibition pH6 can therefore be understood as unpretentious conspiracy to justify the image as a timeless institution concentrated in the tip of the brush or chisel leaving a trail and cut in wood or stone, thus actively addressing the viewer - to pause, to enjoy, consider and reflects in respond; although only for a moment in the flash of visual sensation, dips in the accumulated texture of an image, where the stranded deposits of time traces wattling merging to a fine membrane of mental scars of the highly individual and intimate experience of the artist, so that he feels the image as a medium of artistic growth, which - and this is the wonderful contradiction significant only to art - all the more imaginary far more is real.
During the period of the last ten years after the millennium, the art practice was oriented in conceptualism, where merely the orientation in the exploration of appearances counts. However man has in two millennia made filament of the civilized conception of the world and the cosmos centered on the humanistic principles that their view of man focus again to the man himself and his ability of spiritual empathy in sublime utterances of creation. The individual in-depth dialogue between the artist and the artistic flow of the visible world is therefore an unfinished story - elusive, intriguing and never quite and fully explained
