This statement should help to allow a more profound reading of my painting work, which often is misread due to surface classifications coming from one-dimensional 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 1980s paintings, known as radical painting, and the existential perception of painting as a non-representative reality.

My painting work is based on a specific synthetic way of creation process and perception. This includes the creation process of the body and subjectivity of a protagonist, next to the perception process of the viewer.

I prepare the protagonist (or model), selected on the basis of 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. We then develop the painting in a continuous mostly uninterrupted process 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 an artistic content, but the content as a reality to which he/she may identify with ones own intuitive associative world. The viewer is able to accomplish ones own individual realisation, without being interrupted by the psychological 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 perceptions 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, and radical painting.

My painting is synthetic in the sense that it is bridging opposing elements, fusioning 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.

I do not want to “oppress” the spectator with the autocracy of the artist as the “Artist God” of the 19th and 20th Century, a vision with often limited and narrow visions, promoted mostly due to the needs of the art market for easy recognisable object attributes, evident content and the need to generate adhesion.
Instead, 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; in, through and for the subtle intimacy of the spectator. For it is there, in the solitude and the intimacy of the spectator and the artist, that true art realisation happens.

Nikunja, 2011