Opens Doors to Young Artists

About exhibition

Large-scale paintings, the favoured medium of high modernism, have a monumental quality and an almost hypnotic effect on the viewer. Rather than pseudo-religious worship, however, Hartman’s series of paintings, which includes the three diptychs on display in the White Bronco exhibition, commands a far more minute level of attention. A first glance at the walls of the Mala Galerija reveals a kind of irreverence in the choice of subject matter and, at the same time, an incredible precision in the technical execution.
In the paintings of the White Bronco series, graphic images are immediately recognisable as direct templates for the paintings – the connoisseur’s eye is rapidly struck by the unique and original typography of Ljubljana’s Cukrarna – while at the same time we are disoriented by the ‘non-painterly’ execution of these majestic canvases. Hartman performs the process of copying or transferring to the medium of painting with filigree precision, pursuing a printing-like effect: he adds each colour field in a single layer, without any pastosity or painting depth, consciously avoiding any painterly effect. This remarkable technique, incredibly challenging in terms of the painting métier, is paradoxically intended to give rise to its opposite, a nonchalant luminosity, the translucence of printed material. Yet it is precisely this flatness that gives Hartman’s paintings their depth, specifically their conceptual depth, since it opens up fundamental semiological issues of the nature of the sign. The entire White Bronco series seems to call our attention back to the thought process that drives it from the background. In the diptychs Magnolia and World Pool Ball Association, it is a deliberately inserted ‘error’ that draws attention to this process: a printing misalignment which, in the enlargement of the painting, becomes a signifier with its own capacity for communication.
Hartman’s nonchalant yet tactical sampling on the walls of Mala Galerija lays out a wide selection of recognisable styles, from hyperrealism to op art, in a gesture of semantic neutralisation, the main intention of which is to expose the painting field as a chessboard on which movement across the surface implies far-reaching conceptual confrontations between image, sign and meaning.

 

Production: Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana
Mentor: Dr Tomo Stanič, assistant professor MGBS 
Kurator: Vladimir Vidmar

 

 

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