Curator
Alenka Gregorič
Types of contemporary painting approaches and practices, which are mainly connected with the echo of high modernism, are sometimes described with the unconscious, as a transcendental display of “repressed meaning”. The notion of the unconscious and its derivations in the field of fine art often come with an element of shock and trigger questions about the hidden, thus allowing for a series of interpretive pirouettes and theories, often leaning on the definitions of the sublime and abstract.
Arjan Pregl’s latest paintings present a planned and conscious deviation from the real to the imaginary, from the present to the past, when the artist’s desire for creative expression was an inseparable part of growing up and thus connected to an instinctive outline. These spontaneous notes represent an important basis for contemplating form, colour and composition, for the possibility of analysing strokes, lines and shapes from a time when thought was subordinated to form, and not vice versa. Revisiting his childhood and browsing through his childhood creations is likewise not a new way for the artist to search for answers to pressing questions of his own existence and affiliation with society; such introspections are a constitutive part of his artistic development.
Arjan Pregl’s painting practice is unequivocally connected to his many activities in the cultural and wider social milieu. He transfers numerous responses to the field of art with his ever-analytical mind. Thus, the unspoken word becomes much more abstract and more debatable If the series of works GUGU GAGA was presented in the Art Salon in Celje (2019), created as a reaction to the ofttimes insulting comments of viewers on his works from the Carnival series, presented earlier that year at the group exhibition Time Without Innocence at the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana, the artist decided to deal with the new series Childlike Paintings with the artistry of the works, with compositions and colours. As a basis for reflection on the dominance of form over content, he collects, analyses and reassembles his childhood paintings, which encourage him to reflect on appropriation, formalism, colour syntaxes, design reminiscence and fashion trends typical of the norms of his childhood. In the use of typical brown-yellow interior colours of the 1970s, wallpaper patterns and edging the paintings with a frame outline reminiscent of a Polaroid photograph, the charming records of the artist’s childhood, full of simplicity and carelessness, are most imaginatively reflected. With the mapping and consistent use of chevrons on each of the nine canvases, he once again uncompromisingly slams the door on unimaginative and constantly complaining viewers.
