Marko Črtanec: Muses

Črtanec's attitude towards wood is enigmatic. Wood as material is losing its material nature, the shaped softness denying the proverbial hardness of wood, thus also the argument of Medieval engravers claiming to be using their forming approach to emphasise the hardness and create a striped structure, as if it was impossible to curve it, round it off or soften it. Like a conceptual perpetuum mobile, his yin-yang is reflected in relations between material and form, which are never unambiguous. As soon as you want to label, specify or freeze something, it swings elsewhere, thereby warning about the cursory and slow articulation of perception. In its countless versions and poetics, alongside the processes of planing and chiselling, the virtuoso on the medium – wood dreams of different, parallel worlds full of subversive, playful ideas.

Multi-purpose functionality, associativity and universality of the simple, yet entirely original inventive form: a wooden spoon, q golf club or something else? A wavy table? Chocolates or Japanese balls? A multiplied swastika or the DNA formula?

Associative games lead the viewer to a deeper consideration, e.g. on swastika (“from the series Left and right, small and large”), the ancient religious and decorative symbol, which due to its negative connotations of the right-facing Hitlerian Nazi swastika is no longer used in the Western world. However, it continues to be used in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, particularly its left-facing version, which relates to happiness and still marks Buddhist temples on Japanese maps. This is an interesting fact showing how Nazism integrated its ideology with global mass beliefs at a symbolic level, and how symbols operate at our collective unconscious level. Swastikas by Črtanec are lined up in the shape of an endless DNA depiction, as a rigidly undulating rosary or an abstract form of geometrical shapes. A matter of perspective and consideration.

Ai Weiwei, a Beijing artist, toying with the idea of Chinese mass production, contracted 1600 artisans to create a hundred million porcelain seeds to be spread across the floor of Tate Gallery in London, inviting the visitors to lie on, walk over and touch these “seeds”. As the porcelain dust turned out toxic, the installation was later fenced in. Črtanec's wooden balls express the perfection of individual simple shapes. When composing a mass, their basic shapes establish complex, non-repeating forms, yet – as in nature – despite having similar elements, it is not possible to create products of mass production. Deficient, identical elements, stripped to the bare minimum are different from Črtanec's minimalism, which takes you to a side street you have never visited before, and makes you discover sensually the beauty of touching the form and material (“glittering like polished mirror”).

“Have you ever tried sleeping as high as a table?” says Marko. And tables it is, Črtanec's Muses, personified, rich in form, functional creations surprising in their sense as they exceed so thoroughly the concept of mimesis reflected in the statement of an artist: “What is it that a man really needs, apart from a table, a chair and a bed?” This incidental statement could be paraphrased as: “What is it that a man really needs, apart from creativity, imagination and lust for life?” Following a curious series of beds from 2002, named by Marko Črtanec as Gardens Bjor Haremsfeld, we have a series of tables – unusual, peculiar versions of what has been considered from the antiquity onwards as a “tangible” mimesis. This time, its tangibility evades the established three-dimensional concepts of our civilisational existence.

Aleksandra Kostič

Marko Črtanec wishes to thank the following for their support: his mother Ljudmila, Vojko Kovač, Darko Žekš, Andrej Pohleven, Franci Kavčič, Samo Ferjančič, Bojan Cikač, Marcel Pintar, Jaka Sovdat, Pavel Bernik, his brother Marijan, his sister Anamarija as well as Nina and Tobias.

30 December 2010 – 10 January 2011
Opening: 30 December 2010 at 8 pm
Kibela / KIBLA Maribor

KiBela is open every day 9.00 am to 10.00 pm, Saturdays 4.00 pm to 10.00 pm, and closed Sundays.

MMC KIBLA wishes to thank the following for their support: EU-EACEA, Culture Programme, Brussels, Slovenian Ministry of Culture, Municipality of Maribor and Office of Youth. KiBela programme is part of the European X-OP project.