Igor Bravničar: Casino

Igor Bravničar
Casino
7. 9.–29. 9. 2012

The exhibition Casino is an interactive project – a continuation of the development of Igor Bravničar's conceptual problem, which uses as a starting point one of his older works, in an oil painting technique: the main two problem elements in question are light and color, with the image modified into a new, digitalized medium. The artists thus places into the space of Kibla three square-shaped lightboxes with added control consoles (from the cycle Circle Inversions, 2010, first presented at AteljeGalerija in Ljubljana), introducing different color and structure aspects. The procedure is more than just an interpretation; the process of transformation is the artist's way of searching for new visual information in terms of content, while the exhibition Casino itself adds an important interactive element - the visitor, whose contribution has a significant impact on the final image of the exhibition.

Over the past decade, Igor Bravničar’s creative focus in painting has been the ongoing search for the origins of light on the painting’s surface. In many of his oil paintings one can identify his typical suggestive poetic features in spatially limitless meditative landscapes, in which the artist is primarily interested in modulating old internal tensions of individual painting fragments in relation to the whole, and intensifying individual shades of color and logical passages into a rhythm that modulates the harmony of the whole. The horizon is a frequent motif; this is a polysemous point of passage where the material aspect of the painting passes into the middle ground and opens up room for seeking spiritual realms. The issue of the origin of the eternal light is a frequent philosophical question and a popular artistic challenge that strengthens the symbolic metaphor of an immanent light that can only be reached through a process that, for example, even Plotinus characterized as Beauty that does not depend on measure, material, and relations, but is something that a sensual object acquires. However, the path to this involves the process of taking away more often than adding. In his most recent cycles, Bravničar also selected the modification of light as his central topic. He was interested in which optical structures of color and light are already immanent in the final work of oil on canvas, but are pushed into the background for various reasons, including the structure of our vision. To this end, he disintegrated the image of a traditionally executed painting using a photographic procedure and reconstructed it in a modified way, thus translating it into a different medium and entering the field of digital art. He used this procedure to thoroughly change the tactual structures as well as the tonal modulation and tension of the color spectrum; this is a print on a completely flat two-dimensional surface, in which the contours are blurred especially at the transition points due to enhanced tinting, and the depth perception has completely vanished. Only extracted light alone makes up the modulation of the image. Therefore he also named the first cycle Metamorfoze iz diptiha, (2010) (Metamorphosis from Dyptich, 2010). Even because of its historical evocation, this type of concept best belongs to a contemporary modern display such as the white cube, where the best display conditions are provided. However, the artist’s approach to the problem in particular encouraged us to enable the works of art to radiate and establish a dialogue with the area of a former Cistercian monastery as part of the 2012 exhibition program of the Božidar Jakac Art Museum, and thus seek parallels between Bravničar’s contemplative search for light and the Cistercian self-absorption and search for the divine inner light. Bravničar also follows the improvement or modification of the procedure in his cycle Inverzij Kroga, (2010) (Circle Inversions, 2010), whose works constitute this exhibit titled Kazino (Casino). The artist continues his improvement of producing the same things as negativity—that is, a procedure that Marcel Duchamp referred to as interval in his dialectics—and thus manages to stop traditional copying, while not denying similarity. Today the intensity of visual and sensual stimulations accumulated in everyday life affects us with such intensity that the average visitor finds it difficult to surrender to contemplative meditation based only on a highlighted color vibration. Therefore, Bravničar improved the process of searching in the Circle Inversions, (2010) cycle by producing lightboxes; the procedure used here is practically the same as in the Metamorphosis from Dyptich, 2010, except that the origin of light is immanent to these paintings, and visitors can also interactively change its intensity and light spectrum by using consoles. The object itself also changes due to the technical modulation; with spatial volume it acquires statue-like qualities, and thus fully follows the constructivist perspective of one of the most important modernist artists, László Moholy-Nagy. Nagy claimed that, by looking at a work of art, the viewer must rid himself of the role of a mere static observer or companion, and assume its kinetic energy. According to postmodernist tendencies, this can also be characterized as a fusion of creative and interpretative discourses.
Goran Milovanović

About the exhibition

Igor Bravničar: Biography

After graduating from the Academy of Music in Ljubljana (1989, piano), Bravničar studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels and then obtained a master’s degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He lives and works in Ljubljana and at Studenčić Bay on the Croatian island of Lošinj.
Kindly welcome! Admission free.

The exhibition will be showing until September 29th 2012

September 7th – September 29th 2012
Opening: September 7th 2012 at 8pm
KiBela / KIBLA, Maribor, Slovenia

KiBela, space for art, is open on weekdays and Saturdays
between 9am and 10pm, and closed on Sundays.

Support: Ministry of education, science, culture and sport, Municipality of Maribor, Ministry of economic development and technology as part of OP IPA SI-HR 2007–2013, Office of the republic of Slovenia for youth, and EU agencies (EACEA, Culture Program, Leonardo da Vinci, Youth in action, Brussels).