This statement should help to allow a more profound reading of my painting work, which often is misread due to surface classifications coming from the simplistic orientations through occidental “art historical” and art theoretical views and philosophies.
My painting is neither abstract, nor connected to abstract expressionism, nor action painting. My understanding of painting comes from the radical views of the early 80ies paintings, known as radical painting, and the existential perception of painting as a non-representative reality.

My painting is based on a specific synthetic way of creation process and perception, which participates the creation process with the body and subjectivity of a protagonist and includes the perception process of the viewer.

I prepare the protagonist (or model), chosen based on her/his personality like a movie director would prepare and direct an actor, in regards to the content of a specific work. I extend my own perception through the perception of the protagonist.

After a preparation period, the protagonist and I share a precise intuitive and associative creative space, beyond a simple expression of personal feelings, ideas or thoughts. Through that we develop in a continuous mostly uninterrupted process the painting or series of paintings through and with the texture of the body as an important timeless element. 

Thus the viewer does not meet an individual conception or view of a content, but the content as a reality to which s/he may identify with her own intuitive associative world. S/he is able to accomplish her own individual realisation, without being interrupted by the psychic limits of either the protagonist or myself as the artist. The painting as such is accomplished by the view and perception of the viewer or spectator.

The spectator cannot simply consume the work, but needs to establish and interrogate his/her own perception and follow his/her associative intuitive process. Naturally this is not easy in a world, where one is constantly held to consume in a fast food mentality, running from fashion to fashion, from excitement to excitement.

I see my painting work in a timeless frame, and situate it clearly as an outcome of the knowledge of movements of fluxus, no art, individual mythology, subjectivism, radical painting.

My painting is synthetic in the sense that it is bridging opposing elements, fusionning occidental, Asian and African cultural impulses on a philosophical and psychological level, addressing itself to the existential reality of self perception of the viewer and not to a mere intellectual or emotional level of the spectator. It does not propose an answer, but proposes a question, not a solution, but a way.

Instead of oppressing the spectator with the autocracy of the artist as the artist God of the 19th/20th Century ( a vision promoted mainly by the “branding” of the market) with his mostly limited and narrow visions, I establish and allow the spectator’s  connection to the true meaning of art creation as a link to the manifestation of the existential realities of the human being as such, in, through and for the subtle intimacy of the spectator. For it is there, in the loneliness of the intimacy of the spectator and the artist , that art realisation happens.

nikunja 2011