Maja Šuštaršič
Public-Private

The creativity of Sašo Vrabič is closely bound to the environment from which he comes, in both socio-cultural and formal-artistic senses. He belongs to the young generation of artists who set the image in the centre of their creativity, as a result of the flood of visual images which has steadily increased with the developement of mass media, from pop-art to explosion at the begining of the nineties. Such artists well skilled in using the triumph of media over temporal and spatial distance and, at the same time, they are equally capable of exploring the calssical medium and successfully integrating it in their work
Sašo Vrabič interweaves classical media with modern, and conversly, in this exhibition. The painterly depiction of the mobile telephone, the football match, a girl who offers her services through the internet, and interactive film in the form of a CD, are the main actors of his installations. He uses them to question many of the problems of modern society, and his thoughts are of an existential nature. Just like the medium that he uses for a description of ideas, whether it is painterly or computerised, Bežigrad, as a specific part of the city (architecturally, the urban planning and sociologically), serves him only as a support through which he expresses his critical reflections on problems of the global culture. In the monumental size of the depicted motifs of his pictures he has chosen by coincidence "certain male pre-occupations." He thus ironically defines himself in relation to the macho oriented poses of men in contemporary society, of which the mobile telephone is the great "hit" of the last decade, with its aid interpersonal communication has achived the extreme of general availability, within the framework of which the private greatly approaches the public. The internet medium enables access to a diversity of information, including that which has very intimate connotations. Offering sexual services through the web pages preserves the charm of the intimate moment by creating a false feeling of privacy, in which the viewer appears in the passive role of voyeur. By depicting scenes from a football match the author alludes directly to Bežigrad stadium, which structures the "sport Sunday" of the inhabitants of Bežigrad in a special way.
In depicting the motifs, Vrabič questions their specific economies of exhistence. It is very clear that a fine artist has difficulty competing with the marketing strategies of above mentioned cases, but he nevertheless put in a position in which the environment expects him to create successfully and at the same time to handle his own marketing of himself.
The highlighted motifs, on the example of photo-realism, are taken from the context of electronic media (internet and video) and translated onto the painted canvas. The process of production of pictures is much faster with Vrabič than we are accustomed with photo-realists, and the pictures are thus not worked in such detail. He himself calls the method of painting, which can also be observed in his previous works, fast-realism. In his opinion, it represents the logical result of fleeting reality which the modern media established. Taking them from the original context and setting them in new relations ascribes new meaning to them. With interactive film, Vrabič unites the presented problems into a point of contact. He hints on Bežigrad in the sense of a video game composed of documentary recordings, photographs, videos, sound and conversations with the people of Bežigrad. It enables the viewer virtual wandering between both the private and public spheres of Bežigrad people, and thus attempts to bring to mind the public, and the general obsession with the private. The originality of the private is artificially simulated in film and the simulation of reality is a key task of the mass media in general. The boundaries between the real, and the virtual are thus blurred, whereby the latter plays the role of a parallel reality, as that reality that we can almost no longer distinguish from the "real".

Vrabič's questioning of the relation between the private and public remains open. Just as other of his ideas set out in the present installations remains open. His intention, in fact, is not to reach conclusions but to establish a dialogue with the viewer.

go to s-elected topic