Curator
Maša Žekš
Photographer
Katarina Kolenc
At the Y Gallery Arjan Pregl presents himself with 3 different cycles, each representing a different artistic approach, content presentation and technique. Instead of the numerous drawings we recently saw at the Nova Gorica City Gallery, etchings are now on display, and intricated, precisely created and well-thought-out paintings are now joined by Collateral Paintings, the origins of which we saw last summer at the Gallery Gallery. The selected works, most of which were created in the second half of the year (and the etchings in the last few months!), are somewhat less aggressive and directly sexual compared to the previous trend and the artist's otherwise bold commitment and brazenness. In the spirit of thoughtfulness and wit, they are characterized by subtlety, irony and ambiguity, which is mainly related to a mixture of current loose associations, socio-political content and art historical references, with a pinch of theory and Internet gems.
The central part of the exhibition consists of paintings from the series Images to Come. This is a cycle that has developed over the last two years and, unlike the painter's other planning practice, still evolves spontaneously and surprises with its unpredictability and simultaneous continuity. The bases for the individual paintings are drawings that are created (usually daily) very spontaneously, without stress, constraints or predetermined parameters. A handful of selected images are developed from drawings into technically sophisticated oil paintings on canvas. In the exhibition they combine clear but often contradictory references to specific works of art by well-known masters, a diverse iconography (also in relation to the Slovenian space) and an understanding of the medium of painting as such. The central and largest painting of the exhibition, The Fall of Icarus (2023), combines the most famous motif of the Japanese graphic artist Katsushikai Hokusai from the first half of the 19th century - The Great Wave of Kanagawa (1831) - with an altered detail of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1560) by the Dutch Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. In addition to the powerful waves flowing across the canvas and the humorously stylized legs of Icarus hidden in the corner, the work, with its depiction of the high orange-red horizon and the absolute domination of imposing nature over small man, also bears references to the works of abstract expressionist Mark Rothko and Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich.
The knowledge of art history, the mischievous imagination and the ambivalent message are easily recognizable in some places as the common thread of the exhibition, (for example, homage to Jože Tisnikar, Albrecht Dürer's apocalyptic horsemen, Judith's well-deserved revenge on Holofernes by Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and a simple cynical meme of self-sabotage); elsewhere, they demand a bit more attention and receptivity from the viewer (allusions to Duchamp's Fountain, the painter Hitler in Biblical Paradise, post-painterly abstraction, and Cassius Marcellus Coolidge's Dogs Playing Poker). Despite some clear connections to pre-existing artistic images and their symbolism, the works' ambiguity and irony point to modernity and society's burning, current contradictions. Some of them perfectly and quite a few unintentionally and in some places unconsciously (self-prophetically!) open Pandora's box, in which there are colourful souvenirs of the war in Ukraine, the #MeToo movement, global warming, patriotism, floods, football, nihilism, death and fascism.
The byproduct of the author's work with oil are the so-called Collateral Paintings, which are presented in the exhibition as a permanent result of the precise and time-consuming method of working on larger paintings. The remnants of paint on a classic small format offer a glimpse into a relaxed painting gesture and appear in the form of random stains as abstract stimulants of the imagination. With their painterly playfulness and randomness, they deepen the contrast that is present throughout the exhibition: vivid, optimistic colours depicting dark content, the quick creation of basic drawings but the long-term application of colours to canvas, the unencumbered conception of flashes of ideas, and their thoughtful dialog with art history. The spirit of the exhibition concludes with the title Good one! which, under the guise of a popular phrase, interprets the author's approach to depicting the contradictions of the world while evaluating them in his characteristically ambiguous way.
