Jernej Kožar

LUKA POPIČ

PAINTINGS AND PRINTS

In the 1980s, there was a revival of expressionist trends in Central European art, with the group of German and Austrian artists known as Neue Wilde and the Italian movement Arte Povera receiving particular acclaim. It is in this context that we should seek the roots of the paintings of Luka Popič. In his artistic development, too, Popič resembles the new expressionists of the 1980s. Like them, he began with the expressionistically deformed figure and a few years later arrived at a style of abstract painting that resembled his previous work only in certain details, such as its scratched and worn surface and characteristically somber hues. As with many twentieth-century painters, we see in Popič the evolution of painting from the illusionist to the abstract surface adorned with specific visual signs.

Popič gave up figurative painting in 1995, focusing his efforts instead on investigating the painting surface. While he sometimes handles compositional elements in minimalist fashion, at other times we see an expressiveness conveyed in the thin broken line of his dry-point etching, or in his shades of black and white. It is, indeed, the absence of color in most of Popič’s paintings and prints that supports the notion that Popič’s art is more about discovering the mystique of the line, the paint surface, and the interaction of individual visual signs than it is about representing something concrete. Thus, Popič’s painting is abstract but not totally minimalist, as one might suppose from his minimal use of visual signs. Rather, his work is expressionistic because of the way he uses these signs.

In addition to the paint surface contained in a simple geometric shape, the sculptural quality of Popič’s paint application plays an important role by turning the painting into an object — a sculpture that is no longer a representation of reality, that is, the illusionist depiction of three-dimensional space. Popič uses paint and other materials to create depth in the painting, which makes his works very substantial things, not subliminally metaphysical but rather rawly material, relating them more closely to abstract expressionism and art informel, which in Slovenia found its foremost interpretation in the works of Rudolf Kotnik.

Depth in a picture may be painted by means of such illusionist devices as the technique of central perspective, or a painter may create it with thick layers of paint and other materials. A painting becomes a relief when the thickness of the layered paint and other materials gets to be more than a few millimeters. Naturally, the boundaries between painting and relief (sculpture) are not clearly defined, as they never are in nature; boundaries exist only in mathematics. Popič never renounced the dimension of depth in a painting. When he stopped using the illusionist devices painters employ to achieve the illusion of depth on a flat surface, he then resorted to using jute, sand and paint — in other words, reality, which requires no further representation because it is what it is — it is itself.

After giving up illusionist painting in the mid-1990s, Popič began using collography as his primary medium of expression, which it remains today. Collography is a printmaking process in which paint and the other materials that will later be printed are applied to cardboard. Popič starts by gluing jute to the base and then adds PVC foil and sand. With such materials he shapes a new abstract composition in collage technique. The print acquires the depth we referred to earlier from the varied thicknesses of the materials applied to the cardboard. Blacks and grays are the predominant colors he uses, but we also find red and blue.

Popič uses the same procedure when he paints: he creates collages, except that here, in addition to the materials already mentioned, he also glues print matrices to the painting — that is, the cardboard tiles he used for printing his collographies. Popič extinguishes the aura of the print (the image), since he treats it as an artistic medium used for constructing a new work of art. With this ideological shift he strips the image of the mythological status it has claimed ever since man’s earliest spatial interventions and which has today reached its peak in contemporary museum practice. The visual motifs of these prints and paintings are, of course, subordinated to the collage technique and center on the monochromatic color plane, on which free lines may be either woven together or connected to form geometric shapes.

Popič creates his prints and paintings simultaneously in the way we have described: the print matrix can also serve as an element of the painting, ending its journey there and transforming itself into an aesthetic accessory. This last step is no less interesting and important — Popič abandons printmaking as such, or rather, he combines the painting and the print in a new way. Now, the collography is no longer the end product of the creative process; he uses the work of graphic art just as he had previously used other materials and found objects — he glues it to his painting. A print changes into (becomes the base for) a painting, in that Popič affixes it to a wooden board — not all of it, but only a part — to the degree it suits the pre-chosen format of the wooden board, that is, of the painting. While the printmaking process remains unchanged, except that each time the surface loses some of its detail, the painting is dominated by a monochromatic surface with certain added elements — in particular, the straight line — which only serve to emphasize the predominance of the monochromatic surface.

From this point on, Popič stopped making any distinction between his paintings and prints; rather, he uses prints in the process of creating a painting. The print, that is, the work of graphic art, is no longer the end product of the creative process. He glues it onto a wooden foundation, thus making a new artistic product that is no longer a print — since only part of the previous composition is pasted on the wooden board — but which is also not yet a painting, since this board may still serve as a mere element in another, larger composition. These he creates by putting smaller paintings together to make larger works. One particular example is a composition in which paintings are arranged in such a way that they fit together into a larger surface; when we look at them frontally, in the usual way, we see only their edges.

Compared to his previous prints and paintings, Popič’s prints/pictures/wall installations are not as rawly expressionistic; the relief is not as pronounced, and they are more intricate and subtle. They are based in postmodern expressionism and point to their origin in minimalism, as evidenced by the thin lines and other minimalist features on an otherwise monochromatic large surface. The paint surface is not completely smooth; rather, paint is layered onto a cardboard matrix so as to create a relief. Light refracts over it in different ways and the surface shimmers before us.

In addition to Popič’s prints, paintings, and wall installations, we should also mention his series of large-scale monochromatic pictures. Unlike the paintings already discussed, in these works color assumes the leading role: reds, blues, greens and countless shades in between. Here Popič proves himself a true master, not missing the slightest shifts in color. He applies paints in multiple layers, so that individual lower layers show through; when you look at it for even a short time, the large colored void seems to open up into a spectrum of optical deceptions and/or illusions. Using the end of the paintbrush, Popič makes additional marks right into the evenly applied paint. These marks then create both an illusionary spatial buffer and actual physical depth.

Perhaps Luka Popič’s greatest contribution to the development of contemporary visual arts is his unfettered approach to the production of paintings and prints. The end product of the creative process is still an image, but it is one that has managed to shed a good portion of the ideological clutter accumulated over the course of centuries. Popič demystifies the role of the artist, taking away the artwork’s semi-divine status and preventing it from becoming an object of worship. He presents the viewer with new possibilities of interpretation. The graphic artwork he uses as painting material, creating from it a new artwork — a painting that strives for even higher aesthetic standards. He then takes painting even further, as it becomes part of a larger composition — a wall installation.

Popič strips painting of its mythological status, the status of icon, which has clung to it ever since antiquity. Under Christianity, the image was always moving at the margins of worship, as something church canon always officially prohibited and yet at the same time allowed, since this was the only way the church could retain its ideological and political dominion. The image’s ambivalent status led to ever-recurring conflicts but was also the driving force behind its development. Ultimately, we have to say that the image continues to hold a central place in communication and information technologies. Here it is interesting to examine the issue of realism, that is, the representation of reality — the perfect illusion, the lie considered to be the supreme aesthetic quality, whether during the Renaissance or in today’s Hollywood.

Popič’s way of making art may, of course, be simply an artist’s reaction to the modern-day worship of the images we gobble up in the form of unfiltered information, all with the goal of blotting out the true causes of death. Before the image becomes an icon, it is simply a product of human hands, the result of transforming a thought into a composition of colors and lines arranged on a surface. Here, too, we are witness to the miracle of transubstantiation, which some profane by calling it “representation.” Popič, however, shatters the aura of ecstasy that surrounds the icon and insists that nothing in this world is final; everything is constantly changing, decaying and emerging; and human efforts to preserve the material remains of older cultures are short-lived. The notion that man transforms chaos into cosmos is, in fact, a misinterpretation of the reverse process, for everything that exists is cosmos; it is only man and these other entities, the products of human hands, that are the chaotic forms, which eat away at the catholic order of all creation.