Longing Print

For one and a half decades I have devotedly pursued the quest for an image that would invite, reconcile or heal by touching our profound artistic experience, which is associated with empathy, sensation as well as compassion and love. These fragile, simple images, which the painter with earthly pigments and some drops of water literally pours over the paper or canvas, open up perspectives that we actually experience internally, but fail to realise sufficiently externally. They are the invocations of our sensitive yet forceful conditions, where mind and body, reason and hand, the head and the heart are interconnected. The watercolours of children, in front of which the viewer stands as if confronting his own future, are fashioned so elementarily that it is hard to overlook them. To overlook and not let oneself be touched by them, let them touch the place in us where still a tiny child resides, a child who is waiting for us to view the world through its wide-open eyes. What it is watching and feeling is here and now, is omnipresent and eternal. The “here-present” is unfathomable already through language, unreachable neither through imagining not projecting, it is a creative process and a part of ourselves. The artistic basis of an image, which shows proclivity towards both Western and Eastern art, addresses us in a language that – since it has faith in the skill and is acquainted with tradition – makes space for imagination and the viewer’s inventiveness. How can water that spills, dries and leaves a trace of colour on paper create a landscape, or at least a faithful image of it? What is the secret behind a flash of light piercing through dark storm clouds and reflecting the world, despite the absorbency of paper, so that we suddenly get a glimpse of the almost forgotten dance of earth and sky. Aren’t we so enchanted by this blend of colours and the vividness of the images, not because they are evoked by the magic wand of an illusionist, but by the tip of a brush and the real experience of a painter, because we realise that they are not an illusion, but a vision.... Janko Rožič