One Dollar Bill: Bojan Šumonja and Marko Jakše – paintings, Pierre Tol – music

One Dollar Bill: Bojan Šumonja and Marko Jakše – paintings, Pierre Tol – music
La tela volante
KiBela / MMC KIBLA
12 October 2018–3 November 2018

Over the past two years, two painters, Bojan Šumonja and Marko Jakše, have co-created 24 paintings, while musician Pierre Tol has produced a sound installation. They are presented together at the MMC KIBLA / KiBela Gallery under the name One Dollar Bill.

Under the title La tela volante (The Flying Canvas), the artists' trio takes the dialog between two painters who communicate via the canvas through colors and strokes, and elevates it by means of sound to create a subtle visual ambiance, absorbing us into a unique, enigmatic space.

Marko Jakše and Bojan Šumonja tackle the subconscious, the symbolic, the fantastical, the surreal, the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, yet concrete nonetheless. In a fantastical, polystylistic world, this view to the archetypal, to the human repository that evades definition even though we know it well, melts into a spellbinding expression with the captivating sound elements created by Pierre Tol.

This is the kind of painting that is soaked with life on every level. And embedded into life. "Everything that a painter does gradually becomes painting. Walking and thinking, scratching his ass, sweeping the floor or washing the dishes, watching beautiful beaches and sleeping and dreaming, drinking and dancing with his friends, everything is painting," were the words of Marko Jakše. Painting infects a painter's entire life, until he no longer needs paints, brushes, nor canvases. A painter is a poète maudit, and his profligacy is constant, incessant. A painting watches you, and it sees deeper into you than you see into it, are also Jakše's words. And what it sees, or points to, is "a wildly beautiful world. (...) It is a wonderful enigma, how a painter can paint with such ease and with such indescribable pleasure; how he can paint such brutal, eerie, cruel things – in a beautiful way." Some years ago, Jakše wrote about how paintings never really stem from dreams: "They are from another place. Never entirely from this world, and hence never entirely from the dream world."

Marko Jakše and Bojan Šumonja paint everything that can be painted. They draw on mythological islets of the modern world. Their stroke is color, committed to figurative painting. The titles, subtitles, characters may all be changed, exchanged, altered, gone. They are not serious. Jakše and Šumonja love large canvases. Dimensions of color and image. They are masters of light, but also masters of darkness and spaces, psychological and physical. Their journey through the intellectual and cultural underground keeps unveiling ever new spaces. It opens the painting, so that it surrenders to everyone of us, as it absorbs light and sound. So that it does not ever abandon the medium that enables perfect freedom, so long as we understand perfection as a cosmic urge on the way to human, artist, painter, musician, who chooses, decides, defines only as a part of the creative process, which tries to capture realism in a surrealistic space, and share this experience, thought, emotion and vision with others. Without paints, brushes and canvases, but not without a voice.

Peter Tomaž Dobrila

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Pierre Tol, born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 1970.Lives and works in Pula, Croatia, since 2016.

Marko Jakše, born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1959.Graduated in 1987 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana.Lives and works in Mohorje, Slovenia.

Bojan Šumonja, born in Pula, Croatia, in 1960.Graduated in 1984 from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Italy.Lives and works in Pula, Croatia.

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Exhibition opening: Friday, 12 October 2018, at 7 p. m.The opening ceremony will be accompanied by a music performance by Ana Kravanja and Samo Kutin, two thirds of one of Slovenia's greatest bands, Širom. Last year they won "best record" for their album Lahko sem glinena mesojedka (I can be a clay snapper), and the previous album was also among the top records of 2016. Both covers were designed by Marko Jakše.

https://sirom.bandcamp.com/album/i-can-be-a-clay-snapperhttps://zars.bandcamp.com/album/i

The exhibition will be showing until 3 November 208.

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MMC KIBLA / KiBela