Before and After (Liquid Paintings and a Breathing Set-Up)

Alen Ožbolt: Before and After (Liquid Paintings and a Breathing Set-Up)

Alen Ožbolt

Before and After (Liquid Paintings and a Breathing Set-Up)

1. April 1998 – 8. May 1998

Equrna Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Info

The basic lines and contents of my last project, entitled Before and after (fluid paintings/breathing emplacement), are cyclicaily and dynamically related to my former projects: (Thou, Thine) Thee (1995); Library For the Blind (1995–96); the soft emplacements of pillows for staircase, entitled Moonwalker (The Trhird Man) I. and II. (1996); the room-project Bellevue (1996); and In-visible(To See or Not to See), a large floor drawing in sand. This project supplements and rounds out the earlier ones in a certain casual and informal manner. Thus the Before and after project is not “the love that prevents all breathing, or the maternal devouring of children”, but represents an addition to these statements. At the first sight, or the outward appearance, the common point of all the projects is the domination of white colour, although in this last case it has become already grey, even black indeed.

In 1989, the artist (then within the V.S.S.D. group) realised four fleeting paintings in water, entitled Tears of Painting, and presented them in the mediative form of a document on four black-and-white photographs (scale 1:1). In a way, these images have been an outset for “fluid” paintings and reliefs, executed in an emphasised “wet” technique (1995–97) and presented at the exhibition together with the comprehensive cycle Dream Drawings (special drawings on felt and pillows).

The exhibition is not a popular emplacement, but rather a specific circuit, a flow-through without inclination or strict orientation, and this is also why it does not give itself over to the main flow.

Intro

Gallery is the place/space of art, which determines the work, where the work “lives”. Art opens up the closed space of the gallery, it widens its empty space. Today there are hardly any fixed forms of the world left; they are continually in motion, modification, transformation, and man is no longer the “motive, substance, and measure” of forms (Homo mensura), for many cultural and civilisational forms, for example, exist not only for man (those amusing, strengthening, and delighting her/him), but also against her/him (those bigger and stronger than her/him, which can hurt or even kill her/him). We do not deal with a fixed point, but rather with permanent transformation. It is the time/time dimension/timepiece that dictates and denies the non-typical thinking to man and her/his world – thus, we live in a narrow space, limbo, the interior of timepiece. Nevertheless, accidental and intentional actions, movements, mobility do exist in time; there is no motion without time. (Human) substance is directly and automatically under the attack of (the factors of) time. Ceaseless continuance, repetition, passing, modification, and the time as the actual moment, as the here-and-now that acceleratedly transforms the meaning and term of today into yesterday, into oblivion.

An emplacement is a time-space inscription, a temporary, transient attempt, shorter than duration. On the other hand it is the procedure of making of the painting that is very “extended” in time, in which the subject, substance, or motive is diluted in some liquid, added to or mixed in another material, or form. The subject is other than the image, it both separates and “loads” itself, or “flows” into the image; the image in this case is composed of countless different moist

gestures of various sizes and brightness, arranged in a boundless mass and without definite orientation on the wooden bearer. Control is possible, but limited; there is no equality, in this case it is excluded, or accidental. Multiple time features of space.

Text for the exhibition Before and After (Liquid Paintings / Breathing Set-Up), Equrna Gallery, 1998.

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Installation Views

Selection of Works from the Exhibition

Before and After (Liquid Paintings and a Breathing Set-Up)

Before and After (Liquid Paintings and a Breathing Set-Up)

Alen Ožbolt