Aleksander Červek trio: Intermezzo
18. 8. – 9. 9. 2017
ACE KIBLA / KiBela, Ulica Kneza Koclja 9, Maribor

As the title Intermezzo – Aleksander Červek Trio wittily implies, trio represents the “Trinitarian” potential of the artist, who, with a lyrical creative interplay, stops for a moment at the divergence of creativity’s ultimate principles: between the rational and the emotional, to be able to capture the moment, which is known in music or the theater as inter-play. The interplay in Červek’s creative context, therefore, necessarily means exactly the same: a subject caught between the before and the after inhibits genuine existence, and reduces it to a suspense, to enable the viewer an insight into the object’s interior, which is actually only in the process of being created. In an intermezzo.

Intermezzo by Aleksander Červek Trio is a presentational installation, a three-dimensional organic artwork, which connects and sublimates different media to shed light on the artist’s approach to the creation of a work of art. The present exhibition features four large-size black canvases, recognizable symbols that have marked Červek as a master of “black paintings”. The opportunity, one certainly seized by Intermezzo, enables an upgrade of the basic Rothkian concept of ‘mere’ emotion-pro-voking painting: the Červek-Trio also displays drawings and color paintings, which are thematically linked to black nylon stockings, pulled over the canvases, representing sublime femininity and sub-verted masculinity, Hegel’s thesis and antithesis, synthesized in each and every instance of man’s unique being. Červek breathes life into recycled materials, or ready-made objects: by means of the simplest visual gestures, he paints eyes to the object, through which the latter now sees, is per-sonified, and becomes a subject. The visual creation of an opposite between the rational and the emotional, between the living and the non-living, between object and subject, transforms these art objects into listeners, viewers, arbiters, and critics – into one of us.

The artist’s large black paintings have placed him at the very top of contemporary Slovenian painting, as one of the most radical painters who started out on his creative path in the second half of the nineteen-eighties, a period pervaded in Slovenian painting mostly by a modernist note, with the majority of artists creating abstract works. Sandi Červek has entirely exhausted and reduced the idea of painting: into a black groundwork surface he chiseled a black spiral, which expresses a con-trolled psychotic condition – despite technical precision, the art remains primarily meditative, and this should apply to the audience as well. The painting is an icon that absorbs us, which makes us feel rapture, a Eucharistic moment, since in its blackness it depends distinctly on the source of light, and is therefore mysterious, mystical, or even divine.

The present exhibition by Sandi Červek is not the first opus in his creative career. He had painted in a modernist manner of color abstractionism and art informel long before stepping into black painting, and passed through a figurative phase in between. Intermezzo stands for an intermediate link in the artist’s modality: his painting opus, marked by an absolute abandonment of colors, in the form of monochromatic black canvases, is revealed on this occasion in a different, more relaxed light. Com-munication with the drawing, the ready-made objects, and the nylon-embellished works, enables the viewer a look behind the scenes of something that the artists usually cover up: an insight into the process of creation, which does not exist only in its final form, which is being displayed, but stands for the combination of equivalent phases, which co-exist between, and because of, each other. The artist, therefore, creates a unique organic set-up in a specific time and space. The color palette is varied, even the still lifes are depicted en vivo: they are not mirror images of dead nature, but rather accentuate the vividness of the depicted objects. The same is true of the drawings, which appear as studies, but are entertaining and, above all, positive, due to the ‘revived’ still lifes and the accompa-nying titles.

Intermezzo is a unique moment in Červek’s creative work, a freeze in current time and space, which employs a combination of techniques and topics to transcend the traditional curatorial set-up, upgrading it to a site-specific installation. In terms of style, Červek remains part of postmodern abstract colorism and new informel – emphasizing an informal art without rules or forms, for which the black tulip may not be black enough, but Červek’s noir is all the more optimistic.
– Nina Jeza & Artists&Poor’s

Sandi Červek (1960), MFA, lives and works as a freelance artist in Murska Sobota. He began his study of painting at the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts in 1980-1981 and graduated from the class led by Prof. Gustav Gnamuš in 1985. He works in painting, drawing, graphics, illustration, and design. In the second part of the 1980s he made his debut on the art scene as a member of a generation that turned directly to abstract art and the tradition of modernism. A major part of his work is dedicated to studies of optical effects and complete color reduction, which are manifested in monochromatic surfaces, where light creates an effect of incredible depth and reveals a variety of patterns through accurately applied color layers.

ACE KIBLA is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, the Municipality of Maribor, and the Ministry of Labor, Family, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities. Project RISK CHANGE (2016–2020) is co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union.