Ksenija Čerče / Who's afraid of pink colour?
Ksenija Čerče / Who's afraid of pink colour?
UGM Studio, Trg Leona Štuklja 2
22 October – 27 November 2021
opening: Friday, 22 October 2021, 11.00
curator: Andreja Borin
The hybrid title of the exhibition Who's Afraid of Pink Colour?, with a hint of provocation on the move, foreshadows a painterly reflection on the situation in which painting finds itself today.
It is a fact that the existence of painting, including its own negation, has been constituted in various manifestations in the past and that today, in post-digital and post-internet conditions, painting is being challenged not only in its elasticity, but above all in the mechanisms and potentials of its absorptive transgression. The rhetoric of painting-specific and the integration of non-painting-specific phenomena are in constant extension, so that the proclamation of the "End of Painting" or the "End of Art" in the past can only be understood today from a distance, as Isabelle Graw observes. This is why we can no longer speak of the return of painting (as it was the case in modernism or postmodernism). Painting is not returning, it is present all the time.
Certainly today we are no longer in a situation where painting is the dominant or leading discipline in art. The hierarchies have broken down. The boundaries of painting have become shiftable. Painting in the present is emerging through infection and is found in hybrid forms, i.e. in forms both characteristic and uncharacteristic of painting. Forms are established throughout history. But painting art is subject to a constant extension that is not exclusively historical, still less linear or form-driven, and it accumulates attention in the painting itself—not only as a medium.
Vilém Flusser says that the strength of European culture is based precisely on the opposition between image and language. Especially today, when the mass/communicative nature of visual image creation is so dominant that it transcends language, it is precisely painting that has a relevant voice in relation to the format through which images communicate.
I apply the adaptation of the latter onto the material and its distribution. In this respect, the paintings in the exhibition emancipate the materiality of smoking, silicone masses, PVC nets, urine, waste copies, iridescent paints, mail art, body art, etc. The prostheses/titles of the paintings, such as VOLUPTUOUSNESS—CHERRY WAR OR NESTING IN THE AMATEURS' CLINIC, TEXTBOOK AND SLAUGHTERHOUSE, I HATE GREEN, AMOROUS ARGUING, or VIKING PLASTICON, refer to different orchestrations of emancipation in a preordained lost struggle with the material's own indomitability. (Text by Ksenija Čerče)
Brief curriculum
There once lived a red-headed woman who had no eyes or ears. She also had no hair, so she was only in a manner of speaking called red-haired. She couldn’t speak, since she had no mouth. She had no nose either. She didn’t even have arms or legs. And she had no stomach, and she had no back, and she had no spine, and she had no innards at all. She had nothing at all! So there’s no knowing who we are talking about. We’d better not talk about her any more. (Adaptation of the text by Daniil Kharms, Blue Notebook No. 10, translated by Robert Chandler)
