Ivo Prančič: TYCH.TRIP

1 Triptych
When the viewer tries to look into the background of Prančič's paintings, he/she encounters the fact that events are taking place on the surface of the pictorial field, and this brings him/her to the belief that these paintings were not created as a consequence of some external experience and that they are not representations of a reality. We have to admit that the paintings play with our familiar comprehension of depth; we perceive different shades giving us the impression of different distances of objects. Ivo Prančič uses the basic principle of Renaissance illusionism when he divides the pictorial field into horizontal bands and graduates their hues from the middle to the upper and lower edges, or vice versa. Elsewhere he turns horizontal bands into vertical ones, thus annulling the impression of depth as it was experienced before. The mode of creation of the aforementioned illusion of depth reveals certain similarities to Anselm Kiefer's paintings. It is in this approaching to Postmodern Expressionism that we can look for the starting points of Prančič's painting. Elsewhere, he quite spontaneously layers lighter, glazed colour planes onto a darker background. Traces of colour drops represent an echo of action painting. He presents the viewer with a claustrophobic emptiness of the surface that recalls Francis Bacon's creatures confined in these pseudo-spaces. And he uses yet another manner of painting in which the entire painterly surface is covered by fabric, only at the edges can we see traces of ground colour. Sometimes the fabric is replaced by paint: red is covered by an impasto layer of black that covers - just like the fabric - the entire painterly field, except the edges where red can still be seen.
Prančič varies the three described motifs in different formats and compositions. In colour bands we can find echoes of landscape painting and, later, illusionism based on Renaissance perspective; in light and glazed layers we can discern echoes of Zao Wou-ki's landscapes; and in the covering of the red background with the black impasto layer or black fabric we can search for symbolic motifs in the opposition between light and darkness. He combines individual panels in triptych-like compositions and thus incessantly introduces - in this last phase of his creative process - new fine art sensations. The compounding of panels is strongly present in Slovene painters; we have also seen it in Bogdan Borčić, Luka Popič and Žarko Vrezec.

2 Haptic Spaces
In the 15th and 16th centuries, perspective was the science of the real, not the mode of withdrawal from it. Perspective was the demonstration of the way reality and its representation could be mapped onto one another, the way the painted image and its real-world referent did in fact relate to one another - the first being a form of knowledge about the second.1
We can feel that Prančič - in his use of fabric for the construction of a painting - pays homage to the great ages of European painting, the Gothic, when the proficiently painted textile garments of painted figures represented not only their status, but also the artists' skills. He has upgraded this procedure in his most recent work: in certain paintings, the fabric that covers the background is not only laid in bands but over the entire surface, while elsewhere it has disappeared completely from the painting and the paint returned to its place.
Prančič's paintings are not about abstraction of a landscape or abstraction of an image from nature. They are not simplifications or reductions of fine art motifs that would finally lead to mere colour surfaces. His paintings could be images of his consciousness, sublime images of states of mind certainly influenced by immediate external impulses, although the latter are never explicitly transmitted to the paintings. His creations are being made beyond the dilemma between Realism and abstract painting. But let us emphasise, however, that this is an artificial dilemma, since the abstract is only a deflection from the realistic. Already since the beginning of the 1990s, these creations - being beyond the dilemma between good and evil that has marked Modernism in the first half of the 20th century - are no longer paintings but objects, simulacra, but never depictions.
In the dilemma between the abstract and the realistic we deal with the problem of the depiction of space on a surface which has marked European painting in the past 1000 years. At least since the Renaissance, the illusion of space on the two-dimensional surface has been considered as the ultimate reach of fine art. This changed with the onset of photography in the mid-19th century, since photography and, later, film offered a nearly perfect illusion. Photography has produced a paradox of reality represented as a sign, of the present changed into the absent, a representation, a distinction, a writing. This sensation of reality as representation stands for the final phase of that kind of art which still filled the role of representation, or depiction. The photographs are not interpretations of reality, they are only coded or written presentations of that very reality. The experience of nature as sign, or nature as representation, comes naturally to photography.2
In the 20th century, artworks have progressively given up the task of representing, presenting or reflecting. This role was first taken from them by Marcel Duchamp and then by Surrealism. Cubism brought the decay of representation on the painted surface, but it did not pass the limit of representation, of depicting. Similarly, the theories of relativity only finished off the period of describing nature, when the day seemed not to be far off when man would succeed in creating its perfect representation. The change in the comprehension of the world was only launched by quantum mechanics, this change could parallel Duchamps revolution in the Art. But instead of an adequate description of nature it came to the creation of a simulacrum3, a map at a scale of 1:1. The process started with Sputnik when it first circled around the Earth. At that moment, the Earth changed into an art object, an artefact to be safeguarded, protected from pollution, saved from destruction. Man-artist stood in front of nothing, in front of the awareness that his mission is not in depicting, in illusion, but rather in creation.
The representational function of painting was finally carried away after World War II by Abstract Expressionism and Informel, and later by Pop Art and Minimalism. Andy Warhol eliminated representation by multiplication; in a way, this was implemented again by the WTC Twins in New York, which later suffered their spectacular destiny marking the beginning of a new era of post-humanism. For it is doubling that produces the formal rhythm of spacing - the two-step that banishes the unitary condition of the moment, that creates within the moment an experience of fission. The double is the simulacrum, the second, the representative of the original. It comes after the first, and in this following, it can only exist as figure, or image.4
The growing tendency towards Realism (Informel and Minimalism on the one hand, and Nouvel Realisme, Fluxus and Pop Art on the other) led to a moral condemnation of perspectival illusionism and all related fine art techniques, which finally led to art that has ceased to depict the World. This was also stimulated by the disappearance of the real world, starting with the two world-war catastrophes and continuing with the substitution of the nature by its representation in the form of pictures, photographs and maps.

3 The Ontological Status of Image/Painting Today
We have lived through the experiences of Modernism and Postmodernism, and it has been since then, at least, that artists no longer reflect and/or depict the world. Since the object of artistic investigation, the object of depicting, has ceased to exist as a material fact and since everything around us has changed into representation, we can speak about New Art. A work of art is no longer a depiction of a certain reality, and therefore an abstract image; rather, a painting is an autonomous object and sign. A work of art has become equal to other objects, such as tables, chairs, toothbrushes or telephones.
Such a condition has dethroned the work of art from its pedestal of the absolutely good and beautiful. Many people started to doubt whether it was still art that they were looking at. The symbolic value of a work of art, which certainly cannot be neglected, wavers and therefore cannot be immediately discerned. The ambivalent character of a work of art creates different deviations within art itself. A work of art becomes an everyday object, but in contrast with a usual everyday object it is an everyday object with symbolic value - which ultimately makes it a work of art. Today the most distinguished mode of dividing things, works of art or not, is to exhibit them in a gallery and, later, in a museum as the terminus where things acquire the status of works of art, as well as defined values.
The representational function of fine art has been largely taken over by film and photography, which does not mean, of course, that film and photography cannot exist as unrepresentational artefacts: photographs by Man Ray or, in recent years, computer-processed photographs. And, we can still also find depicting art practices also in sculpture and painting.
Today, the role of painting is additionally burdened by its name - painting. The term painting still bears the meaning of an image, of depiction. Although a painting is still called a painting, it is no longer one, for it reflects nothing; rather, it creates new entities, and therefore, in this case, the use of the term "painting" to describe these objects is misleading. The naming of a painting, which is no longer it, with a name that negates itself - "Untitled" - is nothing but a further blurring of the situation, similar to the case of somebody being named "No-name". A painting is still a painting, especially when it has a name; when it does not have one, we can comprehend it more easily as something else, in a symbolic way.
The title "Untitled" negates the representational function of a painting, letting us know that this is no longer a painting in the classical sense, but rather a work of art not representing anything. In this manner the artist emphasises its new role, the fact that this is no longer a painting. Today, paintings no longer depict anything; they are what they are. The confusion is due to the fact that a painting is still called a painting, although it is no longer one - it is no longer an image, it is something else. Thus the problem of non-comprehension is not a matter of art, but a matter of language and its failure to introduce a new term that would better characterise the current painting. In sculpture, this dilemma is more adequately solved with the neutral term "sculpture", which is supposed to stand for a work of art in the current meaning, while the term "statue" means a three-dimensional depiction of a certain reality.
The dualism of perception and representation is an old antinomy within Western culture, and one which does not simply hold these two things to be opposite forms of experience, but places one higher than the other. Perception is better, truer, because it is immediate to experience, while representation must always remain suspect because it is never anything but a copy, a re-creation in another form, a set of signs for experience. Perception gives directly onto the real, while representation is set at an unbridgeable distance from it, making reality present only in the form of substitutes, that is, through the proxies of signs. Because of its distance from the real, representation can thus be suspected of fraud.5 This platonic refusal of representation as an invitation to fraud is one of the reasons why fine art currently no longer depicts or represents anything.
In the 20th century, artists under the pressure of different catastrophes ceased to be illusionists, because illusion is immoral, a fraud, and because the mission of art has changed. Reality became too painful; it collapsed before our eyes, or, according to Adorno, art is no longer possible after Auschwitz. Depicting nature has lost its meaning; in the immoral world, at least art had to retain a moral position. Fine art has left illusion to film and photography. Of course, this moral stance of art in the face of reality has diminished as the role of arbiter was assumed by the market.

4
Gerhard Richter was perhaps the first to overcome the dichotomy between mimetic and non-mimetic painting. Without grand words he painted both mimetic or realistic and non-mimetic, abstract paintings. With such non-differentiation between both limits of painting he surpassed ideological clashes and made them obsolete. He surmounted the ontological character of painting, which has been in force since antiquity. Perhaps this act was even more important than Duchamp's transfer of art objects from the sphere of art into the sphere of the everyday, and vice versa, or the creation of new non-symbolic entities by Minimalists.
Robert Rauchenberg once said: "A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting with than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric." By mounting ordinary objects onto a painting, Rauchenberg combined the principle of ready-made with painting.
The comparison of Prančič's and Anselm Kiefer's paintings reveals that both artists have divided the pictorial field into bands and that both have used illusionist contrivances, such as central perspective. However, Kiefer's paintings remain depictions; this is also implied in their titles, which make them (ironic) depictions of events, perhaps in a surrealistic manner, for these paintings are not necessarily reflections of events. In Prančič, however, paintings are always only objects that depict nothing, objects equal to all other objects. What constitutes these objects as works of art is a highly virtuosic use of painterly means conjuring the effects of painting, although actually these are not paintings.
This is the essence of Prančič's logic of change. Although he uses classical painterly means, his aim is not a painting but an object bearing all the features of a painting: it is beautiful, painterly; it enchants us with its colours, its subtle layers of hues. The viewer's eyes glide across the surface searching for starting points, or signs, which would refer to a reality outside of the painting. When he finds them, he starts to read the painting as a depiction of a landscape; however, there are not enough signs to allow the definition of the painting simply as a landscape. And another thing: when the painter perceives that the painting is becoming a landscape, he adds fabric, covers it with black, or turns it in such a manner that the bands are no longer horizontal but become vertical, and thus he critically changes our reading of the image.
Prančič uses painterly means - perspective, colour, and other elements - in a traditional way. But the viewer is fully surprised when he/she cannot discern an image while looking at the painting. Even if the painting is grammatically readable, its content remains open, or somewhere else. Today, beyond the dilemma between Realism and Abstraction, the mimetic and the non-mimetic, are we ready to comprehend form and content separately, the structure of the artwork and its mission? Prančič builds his paintings in a high-modernist manner, in the manner of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. But the use of these styles is merely an outward limit; the result is positioned beyond the modernist dilemma between the abstract and the real - the result is an artwork that is no longer a painting, but an art object different from everything that we have known before. It is a post-humanistic artefact.

1 Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1986), p. 10.

2 Kraus, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 113.

3 A surrogate, proxy server.

4 Kraus, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 109.

5 Kraus, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, p. 94-95.