Curator
His painting practice is recognisable by the specific process he applies, characterised by the use of self-adhesive tapes. The artist covers the entire surface of the canvas with tapes, paints an image that he found online on the covered support and transfers it to the new canvas, but not completely. He cuts it into narrow strips of random length. He then glues them back to the base, leaving empty white spaces in between. In this way, he opens the original image and breaks it up into individual parts, which decreases the density of the painting and adds an airier quality to the overall image. He lays the strips systematically and randomly; the final form is a permeable dynamic formation that resides in a delimited space. It is the translation of the digital environment into a tangible image. With their appearance, the artist’s works resemble an intangible virtual space in which an immeasurable amount of data is stored. Among the infinite number of possibilities, Gegič searches for a specific motif on the Internet. He is interested in the phenomenon of elitist sport hunting, in which people kill for fun and at the same time, by killing a large number of animals, significantly interfere with the balance of the natural environment.
The artist chooses scenes that include hunting lookouts and hunters on the prowl, sequences of frightened wild animals and their final close-ups, moments of capture, and death. The dark, cold colours and the cut-out image convincingly emphasise the cold-bloodedness of the slaughter. The artist’s continuous staging of the hunt can be understood as a parable of an asymmetric social order, based on distinguishing the stronger from the weaker. This highlights the impossibility of transcending divisions, the vertically placed strips express strength and do not allow any entry of the horizontal, which would allow the possibility of equality to seep in. The sense of inequality is preserved, just as in the modern era, the processes of selfish hunting for profit, which require an immeasurable number of victims, are reproduced and normalised.
In the Art Salon, the author presents a selection of paintings that, in addition to the hunting motif, are connected by the element of time. The proposals of the presented works are taken from hunting camera recordings. These are special cameras that are placed in the natural environment and serve to determine the time in which an individual animal appears in a specific place. Gegič documents the exact time of the recording and incorporates it in the image, thereby emphasising the documentary character of what is presented. In doing so, he stages the intermediate state of waiting and the tension of life and death. Emphasised temporality raises the question of how to use limited time, which in modern society is oriented towards continuous production. Time therefore appears as the pursuit of surplus value. By continuously depicting the hunting motif, the artist points to the senselessness of this type of activity.
Gegič’s paintings ontologically explore the medium of the image in modern times and question human activity in a system that is built to represent competition, individualism, and hierarchical arrangement of relationships as the fundamental form of social action. His works express the topicality of the medium of painting, as he successfully exposes social and virtual phenomena and novel ways of observing and understanding the reality connected to both.
Mito Gegič presents his works in Slovenia and abroad, at solo exhibitions (Encryption, Gaia Gallery, Istanbul, 2015, UN-DO, Ivan Grohar Gallery, Škofja Loka, 2014...) and group exhibitions (Čas stiskanja, Miklova hiša library, Ribnica, 2015, Arte Laguna Art Prize 13.14: Finalists exhibition, Nappe, Arsenale, Venice, 2014...).
