Curator
Miha Colner
Contemporary humans live in a world of multiple speeds and countless parallel universes. Societies (the so-called developed world) are drowning in quantities of all kinds of content, which the individual must filter and make sense of with his own sacred visual and experiential perspective. As a result, the line between private life and public appearance is increasingly blurred. An individual—especially one who works in creative professions—is expected to be constantly productive and agile. Visual pollution and the abundance of messages that people are confronted with on the daily leave indelible traces in social and interpersonal relationships, in social rules, and in our way of life.
All this is clearly reflected in the art of Sašo Vrabič, one of those creators who devotes himself to the abovementioned phenomena by observing and depicting his immediate surroundings, both his intimate family environment and social settings. Today, these two sides are (or may be) intrinsically connected. The artist is mostly interested in small and seemingly insignificant stories, tiny intimate glimpses of everyday life and fragments of life, which in a pars pro toto manner tell a universal story about the modern state of mind.
On the one hand, he is attracted by the generic nature of modern communication and the constant subjection to new content, which the individual arbitrarily follows and allows himself to be followed. Modern life has largely become virtual, and (communication) media have truly become an extension of man. Hence, the artist has been depicting groups of people completely occupied with their mobile devices for many years.
This aspect of modern society is only one of the components of the present spatial installation entitled Ne-bo, which is multi-faceted and with multiple meanings, a reflection of our modern age. Nothing has changed the way people communicate more than the appearance of mobile phones and other smart devices, which have become irrevocably the most important tools in the lives of laypeople. Today, almost everyone owns a mobile phone, which is primarily intended for quick communication, as well as for ‘killing time.’ But precisely boredom, i.e. the time that allows you to immerse yourself in your own thoughts, is the most creative moment from which new ideas are born. During moments of constant distraction and complete perfection, there is no time, space or energy left for high-quality creative thinking, imagination, analysis, and consideration.
The setting of the integrated work Ne-bo is set much broader and more universally, as it stems from many of the author’s thoughts, ideas, obsessions, memories and desires – things that define an individual’s status in the social collective. Ne-bo is a visual diary that testifies to the artist’s personal relationship with the world without an excessively linear narrative formulation, but only through visual means. It relies on the banalities and absurdities of the modern media landscape, on associative images created from (permanently unreliable) memory, on traumatic life trials and tribulations, and mysteries behind interpersonal relationships and, last but not least, on phenomena such as water and the colour blue, which in the artist’s private world represent a feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, reflection, and personal peace.
The multi-media and multi-layered spatial installation, which includes painting, drawing, poetry, moving images, spatial elements and music, represents the eclecticism of the modern moment in its entirety. The images presented are usually extremely ambivalent, as they are taken from their original context, which is closely related to their photographic template. Sašo Vrabič’s paintings and drawings are, as a rule, created on the basis of transmitted images, either recorded by the author or found in an abundance of media images, which are then combined into a unified whole. In some places they look like a faithful representation of a frozen reality, and in others like imaginary collages.
The connecting thread of the exhibition is first and foremost the colour blue, which is embodied as water, the sky, clouds, swimming pools, and bathers. The author’s obsession with pools and the people who soak in them stems from a personal fascination and from the wide range of implications it offers. Swimming pools are places of relaxation, leisure, joy and rest, which people usually associate with vacations and spending their free time. On the one hand, Vrabič is fascinated by the voyeuristic potential of the underwater view of floating bodies in motion; a view that is largely characteristic of today’s time. On the other hand, he is attracted by the element of water and its apparent blueness, which always implies depth and mystery, which is in complete contrast to the banality and lightness of modern life.
He is also occupied by the need to analyse media images that inevitably shape public opinion and set aesthetic body ideals. This segment was treated in more detail in the cycle Vogue (2002), in which Vrabič highlighted the glamour (and misery) of the lustful media spectacle. In the painting Little Death (2017), he depicts the ecstatic figure of a young woman experiencing an orgasm, but the drowsy expression on her face could be interpreted as suffering, tormented, or even dying. Behind her is the voluptuous image of a young woman in her underwear who looks like she has stepped off a billboard. With this, Vrabič touches on today’s ubiquitous taboo of aging and old age, aging bodies and the sexual pleasures they still need. He is interested in the physical discomfort with the self-awareness that the real body does not correspond to the desirable image of the ideal body. On the other hand, he is drawn to the almost indescribable psychophysical discomfort that comes with adultery, a socially stigmatised act that represents a painful betrayal of a loved one. He applies the traumatic situation of adultery to himself by depicting scenes from a family album that look completely ordinary, and by building associative painting collages that contain fragments of intimate letters that the artist exchanged with his partner. Fragments of manuscripts in the work Tell Me Everything (2017) thus do not reveal the intent and detailed content of short, out-of-context messages, but merely highlight individual meaningful and sincere phrases.
The visual setting is joined by a sound installation, where the author addresses the issue of creating voices and tones, which is part of his daily practice. In his works, Vrabič cannot avoid questions on the act of creation, the connection between privacy and professional obligations, and between intimate family life and public activity in the field of art. Just as the professional career of an artist inevitably encroaches on the intimate sphere, private life also constantly moves into the realm of creation. The author thus analyses the activity in different disciplines, such as music and visual arts, and the connections between them. The musical backdrop of the installation consists of artificial and synthetic sounds, almost void of an intervening human voice, which contrasts with his usual practice of vocal music and vocal rhythms. In contrast to the ambient and substantively neutral soundscape, it is possible to understand the performance in which the author obsessively inflates blue balloons and thereby performs breathing exercises for vocalists, or, as he says, “yoga for vocal percussionists”. The principle is similar to singing, but blowing up balloons is a kind of Sisyphean labour, because instead of creating sounds, it produces seemingly banal visual elements. But it is precisely with this that Vrabič connects the various areas of his work into a unified whole, which are otherwise seldom confronted in the public space, while on a personal level they coexist all the time. The integrated artwork Ne-bo thus becomes an audio-visual allegory of the artist’s creative microcosm, his life and work, which are closely connected and practically inseparable.
