... ON GRASS, 2015 Painting

In a way a quite romantic scene... PAINTINGS 2015 »I am still using my little invention of washing the paint off of canvas as dominant technique to get my results. On top of that, there have been developments. You will notice that there is a lot more light and colour in my latest paintings. I am using the remnants of bottom layers of the paintings as light sources now. Light of different frequencies is protruding from the back.« »It is no great art to paint a circle on a surface. What is great art is to make it appear like it came on all by itself. I paint something, say a circle, I wait, till some of the coulour has dried, I wash it off, but because there are still patches of colour on the canvas, there are still parts of the circle present. I then use a different paint and in the end after many layers like this, something appears, that looks like a circle, which wasn't done entirely by my will.« »Is this absence of will essential?« »The painting is still an expression of will, but the will becomes indirect. From the direct painting or drawing on the canvas illustration comes out, which is a problem. Because illustration is something that we all master between the first and second year of the study at the academy. »Is this about what you recently wrote in your column, that we have to get to something deeper in art, to 'invent new forms, new algorithms'. Is this the challenge of contemporary painting?« »This has always been a challenge. It is an ongoing process. Art doesn't progress, contrary to what people think. At some point is turns into a boring gesture and needs renewing. But not in the sense of progress. If we say that art makes progress, we need to ask what does art progress into. We can see that cars are getting better, the computer science progresses. Does that apply to arts also? Is Picasso better or is he a progression in respect to Rembrandt? There is no progress in art. It is about inventing new forms that cause new types of intensities on canvases.« From an interview with journalist Maja Pertič Gombač in Primorske novice, autumn 2014. »We will talk about the duality of an image, about that which a painting gives or takes in the artistic way … Or to put this differently: how does an artwork devote itself. This is in a way a crucial question, because it proposes a border between a painting as violence against the eye, meaning one's own – internal – body, i.e. violence against a gaze, an event that is an experience and an idea and a painting as basicly a baseless act. The question could also pertain to a thought, to thinking itself, and in connection with the thinking to any type of interpretation, explanation. How to achieve nonviolence, that is supposed to expose an image – not determined by its contents – in its pure weaving.« Andrej Medved, intro text for 2014 solo show at Monfort, Coastal Galleries, Portorose.