The enigma of our being, our existence, the meaning of life and the great mystery of death has been an eternal philosophical question across all cultures and religions. There are countless explanations and views, and not only in philosophical and religious treatises; unique and diverse answers and interpretations can also be found throughout centuries of poetry, prose and all other forms of artistic expression.
This exhibition of the works of two artists, the young Chinese painter Wang Xin and the renowned Slovenian painter Zoran Mušič, is dedicated to this grand and artistically challenging subject, for there are few artists that have devoted themselves to this thematic for a longer period of time and distilled it into art in such a vivid and creative way. The energy and intensity of the emotional charge of these works pierce through to the viewer and move him deeply, and thus also connect the two artists, even though they come from dissimilar backgrounds, motivations and different time periods. To any sensitive viewer these works reaffirm that sincere artistic energy connects us, is eternal and knows no geographical partitions.
The pastels of Wang Xin, which were created in the past two years, are both a memento mori and a poem of life, transformed into an impressive visual reflection on this thematic. The carefully chosen intense green colour and pastel technique of the presented artworks carry the artist’s dual symbolic message; the chosen colour is the umbilical cord of her visual bond to the landscape from her childhood and youth, while the extremely sensitive pastel technique conveys the precarious impermanence and ephemerality of material substance. These energetically painted images in piercing green, done in one breath, these silhouettes rendered in fragile pastels, these fragmented human body parts transform, flow and grow into intensely wild green vegetation, into the fluorescent, trembling foliage of jungle trees and undergrowth, into black roots and silver threads of water. They disintegrate into bright sand crystals and grass along the shores of the river rapids and waterfalls of the landscape from Wang Xin’s youth. It is a submersion in nature, where the essence of life and death has become an acceptable and calm transformation of matter, a transition into a different form, a different sphere of material existence. Panta rei, with the ritual dance and the gods that accompany us.
These images are not the corpses of Zoran Mušič, who, even in death, still contort with the immense horror of their suffering and are the terrifying, silent witnesses of human evil and torment. However, with his immense artistic talent, Mušič was even able to transfer his horrific experience into pure artistic expression. Only thirty years after his ordeal in the concentration camp was the artist able to express his daily nightmares, and only toward the end of the several years of his painting process, with which he created the cycle “We are not the last”, did his agony subside. We can sense that the pain of what he experienced abated into compassionate mourning and grief. We see the corpses transforming into shapes and blotches – mounds; petrified screams turn to rocks and corpses become part of the earthy landscape. From the earth we come and to the earth we return …
Živa Škodlar Vujić
The exhibition opening will take place on the 16th of March at 7pm. The artist Wang Xin will be present.