FROM ISOLATED CHILDHOOD MEMORY TRIGGERS INTO EXPLORATION
UNIVERSAL ESSENCES
I can say that my painting opus has been evolving alongside my personal growth and self-inquiry of own identity, my primal impulses, ambivalent emotions and memories, as well as points of their contact with the collective unconscious, as portrayed in paintings of magnified images of world’s smallest organisms (seeds, pollens), reminiscent of totemic origins awaiting within the deepest sea and space for the opportunity to expand into new life. My first attempts at painting are connected with primary emotions and memories, embracing on the one hand first subconscious reactions connected to food or sweets from confectioner’s shops, stores and advertisements, all the way to childhood fascination with ‘forbidden’ fetishes such as cigarettes and coffee. Paintings from the earliest creative period could be titled ‘Memory fetishes’ and have the common thread of search for ways towards emotions that were stifled in childhood, be it through visualisation of eruption of oral pleasure or through individual images as symbols of a desire in all its magnitudes.
An altogether different form of eruption is indicated in the Atomic mushroom cycle, which, if we reach for a slightly psychoanalytical analysis, has partly retained the oral fixation on food (mushrooms) and partly took under the scope the dangers and fears I became aware of in puberty (fear of nuclear explosions and radiation, having lived just next to a disused Uranium mine). Parallels between artificially created nuclear bomb, the product of human ambition and vanity, and a mushroom that grows in nature, drawing in all toxins from the environment and returning them back to humankind, show a connection between the symbolic and reality, individual and universal, the traumatic and the cathartic in the sense of awareness that each of our actions has a consequence, something we generally become aware of once it is already too late to change them. The mushroom’s specific shape is also the point where our civilisation’s past and future meet – on the one hand it revives the memory of the second world war, the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the cyclic nature of historic events on the other, the fact that history tends to repeat itself and that every generation must, due to imbalance of global powers and its own ambitions, re-live the fear of complete destruction of our planet.
The idea of cyclic nature is instantly detectable in the cycle entitled Seeds. Its round-shaped canvases with images of seeds, origins of life, evoke the thought of reproduction and continuation of species and tell the story of micro cosmos being intertwined with macro cosmos, depth of the ocean with space, and interconnection of life and death. Style-wise, paintings are on the one hand relating to botanical sketches from expert literature and the internet, and the aesthetics of photo realism created by photographer Rob Kesseler, who uses microscopic blow-up and colour processing of photos to blur the lines between documentary and artistic photography. It could be said that after seeing his work a chain of automatic responses was triggered and brought me into search of morphological and colour parallels between origins of plant life and simple deep ocean organisms, all the way to fractals and phenomena found in space. Each painting is entitled with Latin names of plants and sea organisms portrayed on the painting.
If the Seeds cycle, which was created from 2012 to 2017, opened the questions on origins of life, genetic engineering and interference in hereditary characteristics of individual plants and animals, and bore witness of my entering the mature period of creativity and the appearance of recognisable stylistic expression, it was however the Pollen cycle, origins of which go back to last year, that was a step forward in search for universal essence and provenance of creation, which I began discovering in pollens, which seem to be storing information on derivation of life on Earth in its tiny microcosm. The name of the cycle itself indicates the topic of tiny powder particles of different species of land plants (i.e., lavender, grasses, birch, banana, alder tree, blue cypress and martagon lily) which are predominantly accompanied with different cosmic phenomena. Despite being directed towards beginnings, the attempt is to also derive from the origin the mainline towards scientific questions on the future of species and survival of the planet that also bares the tremendous pressure of heavy ecological issues possibly exactly due to quick technological development, scientific experiments and genetic modifications.
Changes in vision perception which seems to bring distant points closer through the microscope lens or the universe, are accompanied with changes in painting technique, in choice of materials and motives. While acrylic technique is predominant in Memory fetishes and Atomic mushrooms opuses, the Seeds and Pollens opuses are created in gouache technique, the better choice for allowing optimum reflection of the photorealistic form.
The common thread being disentangled from the Memory fetishes labelled with sweets as personification of primary pleasure, childhood and teenage memories and the material fetishism of its own which gain explosive dimensions in wider society, the Atomic mushroom cycle, as it expands the sphere of collective fear and self-destructive Eros, the Seeds fall even deeper into (sea and cosmic) depths of the unknown, all until they land as Pollens on a mysterious planet where it springs into new life, new idea and a new painting opus, opening endless interpretation possibilities.
The cycle entitled Plant cells which started being developed in 2018 is different from the Seeds and Pollen when it comes to technique, as the Gouache technique continues to be used, while it content-wise refers to the memory fetishes and Atomic mushrooms cycles, as plants that represent our sustenance (bananas, soy, red broad beans, etc.) are now in the forefront, as our medicine (lime tree, pine, elderflower, gingko, hibiscus, etc.), but also potentially deadly intoxication (Datura, devil’s trumpets yew tree) when consumed in excess.
There are cellular structures of single plants in the background of paintings, mostly cross-section views of stem and root cells, appearing as mandalas and abstract landscapes as backgrounds for insertion of other parts of plants into larger plans. Although colourless in its original form, cell preparations are enhanced with intensive colours added in order to supplement their own landscapes, becoming reminiscent of the colour of the earth and the environment the plants are originally embedded in. Unlike certain previous cycles, when the goal for botanical recognisability guided me to apply photorealism in order to scan details with surgical precision, the Plant cell cycle sees me return to vehemently bold application and colour.
Plant cells therefore represent continuation of the concept which I have been developing since the beginning – the connection between micro cosmos and macro cosmos, the origin in the form of a seed, pollen and the cell as a complete organism, i.e., space that develops from it. In more philosophical aspect, my painting deals with search of origin, perhaps even the search of the godliness, i.e., the divine within the mundane reality that surrounds us. It is as if the search of origin of plants, animals and other beings that tend to co-exist and co-inhibit alongside myself, I am simultaneously in a constant search of my own origin, which I tend to dissect with technical surgical precision, or allow it to overflow me in the form of the numinous and sublime through the symbolism of plants, food and the tremendous intertwinement of Eros and Thanatos.