Gigo de Brea: De regreso a la naturaleza
(para percibir, no solo para esparcir) /
Nazaj k naravi (zaznati, ne le trositi) /
Back to nature (to perceive, not just scatter)
16. 8.–7. 9. 2019
ACE KIBLA / artKIT, Glavni trg 14, Maribor

De Brea’s landscape is neutral, atypical, even non-objective, what is important and at the forefront is the emotional charge, with which it is depicted. Mentally and psychologically De Brea filters his emotion directly into the painting, which, for that reason precisely, receives an immediate, un-postponable endowment without any need for a certain distance; which binds each viewer to a momentary “consummation”, to pleasure in watching the image, to pleasure-in-view. There is no distance, the only thing that matters is empathy, which in its essence is always direct, without any limitation. Where the meaning of the image is hidden, defi ned through the author’s mental ap-proach, which now becomes fi nal and binding for us and for the painter. It is therefore the emotion-al experience that pulsates in these images and allows – us – psychological and physical empathy.

/. . . / *

These paintings are no longer daydreaming, a regressive reverie over the loss of a painting object, but rather an endlessly living pulse of an image. Hence we could hardly say that the artistic ap-proach and visual expression are reduced in principle, quite the opposite: in no way do they revoke the basic message of the painted canvas, but rather enrich it by means of enjoyment, the relish which now guides the artist’s hand. The specifi c pulsation, the throbbing of the pictorial screen only adds to the expressivity of the work, its symbolism, the “bright modernism” which is now guided by mental experience. The painter is not separated from the things presented by the image, however, the depicted objectivity is in fact conditioned by the state of the soul and not only by an imitation of nature; and this state carries within itself only the personal, existential, not the cultural, civilizational, or historical equivalent. And yet it depicts, seeks, replaces this loss with paintings of symbolic mental landscapes, although they can hardly be called landscapes. These works, namely, are a simulacrum of a subconscious journey and landscapes related to emotional content; phan-tasms of an intact whole which is still possible inside the soul; a retrieved lost paradise guided by the author’s desire – joy, lust, delight and pleasure – in the painting of landscapes of an emotional and sensual, one could say, “animalistic”, soul.

/. . . / *

De Brea is a painter of chromatic landscapes, purified layers of paint which vibrate in the pictorial screen with undying emotion. His painting is close to “expressionism”, however, there is a certain visual autonomy in his work, which would hardly be classified by means of a clear comparison to familiar, evident art periods. It is therefore about painting as an “open possibility”, where each approach provides material for a diff erent kind of rapport; where each minimum style resides in another minimum style. The painter, namely, is prepared for variants – and opposites – of the same stylistic process, which characterizes the fi nal work as a fundamental structure and visual synthesis.

* Excerpts from original text (translated by Helena Fošnjar)
Andrej Medved: Vulkanična in planetarna tihožitja (Volcanic and Planetary Still Lifes)
Gigo de Brea: Planetarne pokrajine. (Planetary Landscapes). Meduza Gallery, Koper (February/March 2011), Obalne galerije Piran, catalog, 201

Gigo de Brea was born in 1963 in Maribor. He graduated in painting in 1987 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. He paints exclusively large-format paintings in oil on canvas. He lives and works in the Karst region.