Milena Zlatar
FONS ET ORIGO
The Drava Valley and Munich
Darko Lesjak, born in 1966 in
Slovenj Gradec, has been marked by the Drava river and its tributary the
Bistrica more than he has ever been aware of. He spent his childhood in
Muta, a village on the left bank of the Drava. The slow-flowing waters
of the Drava reflect the slopes of Pohorje and Kozjak, which give it its
specific colouring: from intense green, to the hues of dried grass and
intensely coloured autumn leaves. A stranger who happens to visit these
places will keep these images in mind forever. The painter Oskar Von Pistor
(1865-1928) is still remembered around here, for he had exchanged his native
Vienna for the idyllic but harsh life in the Slovene countryside. Something
else also links Darko Lesjak with the painter Pistor: they both studied
at the Munich Academy, although with a time difference of an entire century!
(As a coincidence, I first met Darko Lesjak due to a Pistor painting; it
had been restored very proficiently, and I wondered who had done so successful
a job. While a student at the Maribor Faculty of Pedagogics, Darko Lesjak
had worked as a conservator at the Monument Protection Office.) Just as
Pistor was driven by love to leave behind Vienna and cosmopolitan Munich
for the then hinterlands, love spurred Lesjak to leave the Drava valley
behind for the metropolis. Lesjak studied at the Munich Academy of Fine
Arts from 1992 to 1997, when he completed his postgraduate studies under
Professor Jürgen Reipka; since 1999 he has been Reipka’s assistant. In
1995 when the Slovenj Gradec Art Gallery organised an exhibition of Pistor’s
works ; it now has prepared an exhibition of Darko Lesjak’s works for spring
2000, eight years after his first personal exhibition – as a graduate –
at the Maribor Faculty of Pedagogics.
Lesjak has often visited his
native surroundings – despite his obligations at the Academy and frequent
exhibition activities in Germany, he has never broken off relations with
his homeland and people. However, he has not had any exhibitions in Slovenia
after 1992. He returned time and again to the »green valley« for »spiritual
sustenance«; again and again he was enraptured by the Drava river and its
tributary the Bistrica, where he spent his childhood and a daring adolescence.
But then came 1991, which brought a shocking experience: the construction
of the Golica dam. The Bistrica river turned into a menacing allegory of
the end. (Quite an irony: the name of the river denotes clear water, a
rapidly flowing river.) The riverbed is often dry, the water frequently
reeks, and over 22 million cubic metres of water threaten the valley from
behind the dam. The inhabitants, defenceless in the face of an ominous
threat of ecological catastrophe, have built an Ecological Chapel and dedicated
it to St Francis of Assisi in hope and intercession. The chapel became
a point of pilgrimage, symbolising the awareness of mistakes made by men
on their own behalf, or destruction.
Water as fons et origo, the
source and the beginning, can also represent the end as diluvium, the Flood.
And Darko Lesjak has sympathised with his people, although he has lived
far away from them; his genius loci is related to the places where he was
born and raised, and where he discovered that fine art would be his life’s
mission. He has combined genius loci and genius seculi; local peculiarities
that he has felt and carried within himself blossomed in the spirit
of the time in which the second millennium met the third. We could speak
of his emphasised interest in nature, in microcosm and macrocosm, especially
during his studies at the Munich Academy. It was this same Academy that
played an important role in late-19th century European painting, and also
blew some fresh air into Slovene fine art. Today the Academy still reveals
its openness: it is well aware of the universal character of the language
of fine art, and does not confine itself to a narrow national framework.
Its students come from around the world, bringing their own cultures to
Munich, where they acquire cosmopolitan attitudes and recompose them into
their own ideograms. The individual poetry of each individual allows for
a plethora of singular inventions – all the way to multimedia combinations.
Pictorial surface, colour and substantiality
A painter transfers (projects)
a set of ideas and feelings on conscious and unconscious levels to the
material bearer, in our case a smooth pictorial surface: »Being so limited,
the painting is a completed idea in a completed pictorial space; it is
the dwelling of spirit in the limited material space of the given pictorial
surface – and therefore an eternal challenge to the creativity of painters.«
(M. Butina)
In Lesjak’s case, at first
glance, the body of a painting seems to be smooth, somewhat »polished«,
and the application of pigments does not eliminate the effects of smoothness,
shine and transparency. The surface of the bearer absorbs the binder only
as much as it takes to bind colours. »The painter sees the substance not
only as a mediator between inspiration and its expression; the substance
itself has its own beauty.« (Raol Dufy) The chromatic dimension of Lesjak’s
works is particularly significant: it is not only a register of colours,
or tonality; colours are secondary. It is a conscious selection of colours;
a glow that does not result from the plethora of visual communications
in the daily life of the metropolis. Lesjak’s colours are not relative
to the nervous pulsation of colourful advertisements; rather, he has brought
his »ambience of colours« (according to A. Trstenjak ) with him from the
Drava valley. He has sought a balance with green and red, and their amalgamation
has led to a white transparency. When we »dip« ourselves into his colours,
we can understand what the poet meant with his statement: »If the eye had
not been sunny, it could not perceive the sun.« (Goethe) In other words,
our senses and sensations are open to the pictorial language of colours.
The painter takes us to a familiar world, be it the depth of a river or
the bottom of a pool; our imagination grows larger inasmuch as the artist
succeeds in authentically presenting it. All our senses are mobilised to
perceive what we had always known. Membership in a shared culture and historical
memory is expressed in a stronger way than we could expect on the basis
of the established patterns of the society to which we belong.
The Pool of Light
Thus, Darko Lesjak finds inspiration
in water. In his youth he had absorbed its waves and mov, its constant
changes, the colourful reflections in its transparency; this experience
has been decisive for his subsequent expressive poetics. Transparency,
lacquer coating and movement became a rule, an aesthetical standard that
also generated the pools of light. These are transpositions, or even trans-substantiations,
where the painting is no longer material, but rather changes in a specific
space into an experience of light. Transparency, already evident in the
characteristic application of colours, is accentuated inasmuch as the bearer
permits the inflow of light and reflects it as a lens. The notion of light
passing through the bearer became so strong that Lesjak spontaneously adopted
it and decided on truly transparent materials – foil and glass. At first
he used them as a bearer, but later on he employed glass for the gradation
of the »pool of light« effects.
Rhythm and Movement
To fix reflections in concrete
symbols means to draw a line, to make a sign. Therefore, we can link fine
art and writing: they share physical impulses. It is almost certain that
the first graphisms signified rhythms rather than forms, for »fine art
at its beginnings is directly connected with language, and it is much closer
to writing in a broad sense of the word than to art: it is a symbolic transfer,
not a copy of reality« (A. Leroi-Gourhan) . Gesture and rhythm guide the
activity of fine art. Their importance was exposed during the ‘50s and
early ‘60s (Action Painting emphasised the spontaneity of gesture), while
later the emphasis on the gestural depended on the characteristic individual
poetics, which is also clearly evident also in the creations of Darko Lesjak.
If in drawing he has retained the expressive substance with a discernible
figure, his canvases and other flat bearers (glass or special foil) have
been created through the movements of a »nervous« brush, creating »restless
spaces«, familiar to Emilio Vedova in the ‘50s. He has reintroduced »dripping«,
the characteristic trickling, when his body occupies a »position for action«
(action painting) above the pictorial surface placed horizontally some
40 centimetres above the ground, and the energy from his entire body is
transferred onto the surface. Lesjak recreates the river’s flow; we plunge
into the river’s deptha and are caught in the turbulence of the otherwise
silent flow, which also represents the whirling of its energies. Traces
of a brush or cloth are the inscription, the junctions of organic forms,
alluding to an embryo: water and embryo as the inception of life.
The placement of the exhibition
in the Slovenj Gradec Art Gallery represents a staging of the artist’s
poetics in a way that completely enlivens the gallery premises. Together
with the artist we initially planned to install »Aquarium II« as a twin
of the original installation in the Akademie Galerie in Munich, i.e. completely
illuminated (one aquarium in a dark room, and another in a white room).
Later, however, we decided that we should try to approximate the original
installation as much as possible, so that the aquarium reveals the effects
of both light and darkness (theatrical installation). With the placement
of the paintings onto glass, on the contrary, we wished to employ the light
and its special effects made possible by the selected material. (Lesjak
also gave specialised courses in the use of glass – the so-called Floatglasmalerei
– in workshops in Frauenau). And, drawings and photographs in the installation
that particularly exposes the problem of light in the grammar of the language
of fine art, take on the role of correspondents.
