Curator
Petja Grafenauer
Miha Štrukelj is an artist with an international career who has since the late formally and substantively remained faithful to the concept of the “grid,” which is the prime basis of his works. The image of a pixel from the time of the first useful home computers combined with one of the painting methods for transferring sketches to paintings, or in Štrukelj’s case, photographs, has become and remains a building block and leitmotif of Štrukelj’s works to this day. But the use of the grid changes, albeit being a constant basis of his creations, which are to an extent expressed according to the painter’s vision, or a mere remnant of a line or a graphic element on the canvas. This results in the works’ wide variety of layering and its deepening effect.
Štrukelj is a painter of vedutas with figures, a motif that can be traced far back into the history of art. Unlike paintings that accurately, realistically depict a city, a landscape, or a part of them, before us are formally finished cut-outs of views of the populated side streets of modern-day cities, from Los Angeles to Taiwan. If, in the early decades of the 20th century, Edward Hopper realistically, yet without breaking down the image with the addition of materials introduced by this century, timelessly depicted the solitude of American diners, Štrukelj’s motif is a city side street, removed from the main avenue.
With an almost sociological interest in the real life of a city and a parallel visual interest in a fascinating part of the world, which nowadays is rarely seen in the structured and organised tourist zones, Štrukelj presents us with images of lively side streets. These images are initially taken with a camera, processed, and are, through the process of relaying them onto a grid, transferred to the canvas. But the transferring of an image does not involve the desire to no longer separate the photograph from the paining or drawing. It is not meant as an approximation of photorealism. Štrukelj paintings are their own entities, roughly separated from the photograph, which is additionally created on the canvas. Hence, they emphasise certain details and with the experienced hand of a master draughtsman who knows exactly when to use ink, charcoal, acrylic or pencil. An artist committed to painting does not stop there. The image is also built by masking tapes and coloured papers, which determine the overall colour composition of the images in dark, predominantly brown-black colours and their variations.
Along with the paintings in the artist’s oeuvre, characteristic drawings are also included. He uses pencil on paper when depicting only one of the layers of a photographic image, turning the drawing into a near-abstract work, or he layers these images one on top of the other on Polymat foil, thus creating a resounding sense of depth.
At the centre of Štrukelj’s work is his experimentation with depth and surface, with painting and the processing of everyday images. In the latter, an excess of art can be seen, which transforms the image into a painting, not only by making it recognisable or abstract, but by creating a painting surface from the image with various materials and using them to stage different flat images, while adding to the image surplus value, attributing the painting itself with greater appeal via its method of production, stains and precision, construction, etc., more so than the motif depicted on it. However, even without the latter, the artist’s works would not become the pieces we know so well and admire so much.
