Stratum 2 Exhibition

Painting

There is no doubt that today (*Today is the good old time of tomorrow), it’s clear to many that painting is no longer a term for visual experience, just as it is not a space for 3D or physical experience. Nor is perspective a name for something visible or anything like it. It seems that man has grown weary of everything that once made Western civilization what it recently was and what it still partially is. Relativization has been carried out publicly on multiple grounds, but it appears that a general “unease in culture,” along with a general negation of education, is producing a “culture of forgetting.” Until recently, painting was a term for visual experience (Das Bild, Pitura, Quadro, Pictures, Obraz), and all those experiences, symbolized through language, were condensed into IMAGE. That, too, was supposed to be painting – but the term no longer appeals to just one experience. Time has also become part of that unexperienced space, because information – in order to travel far and fast – must be temporally unlocated, simple, and unburdening in every way, so that it can replace the recently lost physical world.

Indeed, from the very beginning, since prehistoric people drew on rocks and their own skin, painting was a concept – not a visual fact. So it remained when images were created on vases and tomb walls. Then, paintings-as-concepts were made on glass and wood panels. Canvas has only been in use recently. And then, again, not so much. All materials produced by modern man now carry the IMAGE – both static and moving. The historical IMAGE has slipped out of control; more precisely, its connection with the real world – which is not an IMAGE – has been severed. That is why the term IMAGE is now freely used by anyone, however they please.

In this context, as part of a series of attempts to resist the general cabaret (**I’m happy when it rains, because it rains even when I’m not happy), some painters still paint on canvas. That futile labor speaks directly of the nature of a fading culture that could yet be preserved, as a correlation between human biological capacities and a desire for a kind of alchemy. And just as a letter or an Eastern cryptogram symbolizes and invokes a concept, a gesture, a thought, a sound, and a scent, for the cultured person, matter can be something else. Woe to those who don’t believe in this.

To attract someone to look – and to truly gaze – at a piece of canvas is precisely a cultural act of invoking transcendence. (***It’s the same as with any science. In the end, it turns out everything was different.)

Quotes: */ **/ *** Karl Valentin
Text: Vladimir Gudac

Dino Topolnjak was born in 1985 in Čakovec. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka under the mentorship of Vladimir Gudac and studied film directing at film.factory in Sarajevo under Béla Tarr. He works as a painter and in the film medium as a director, scenic painter, and set designer. He has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Rijeka, Zagreb, Pula, Dubrovnik, Labin, Berlin, Düsseldorf, and New York.