A painting – if it is artistic, that is a /kind/ of creative force and mental sensation (feeling, experience, message) – obscures the story about us, about the artist, about the meaning of artwork. Nothing in it is random, senseless, just like that; everything is captured in “insight” even if the artist does not realize it. Art is no mere amalgamation of metaphors/images, a kind of arrangement – sequencing – of the artist’s perspectives or momentary conditions without the fundamental Experience that connects all existential, and also ethical, aesthetic “flashes” into a unified presentation in a gallery. Rather, art is revealed in the form of the work as manifesto: statement, narrative, program. Images bring to us a /kind/ of possible and also impossible knowledge, a kind of insight about art in our times. It is not one perspective but a multitude of views pulsing in the invisible intermediate wall of the painting. It is a perspective projected outward that bounces off the “screens” and goes inward again, repeating itself in endless reflections. It is a perspective that offers no insight, where there is no knowledge, that, in fact, turns back in on itself, into its own “cul-de-sac”. It is a perspective that searches but /no longer/ reveals a mystery. The painting which wants to be but /no longer/ is an enigma. This other that oozes into the painting; this Other is the art of painting. The other as otherness, the art of recent history, has, as Brejc says, the ultimate door bolted behind it.

These paintings speak to us though the ages about the art of painting in a time period that does not allow it; and yet they speak “from” the painting, “from” the art of painting. The question is posed but the answer is not (yet) possible. The mute image speaks, asks without questions, answers without final definitions. It positions itself on the extreme edge, on the sharp border between classical and postmodern; where there is no way forward and no way back. And it persists in close proximity to openness toward the new. And in solitude, the solitude of the paintings and of the art of painting.

Disquiet as undulation: agitation, wrinkles in the “mirror of time”: in time like oblivion, in a condition of inactivity, of nothingness. The image printed in the nothingness of movement; fabric, texture, the body: imprinted, unwrinkled, undulating into an instant that becomes eternity. Or put another way: Time, printed on canvas, on a background, a foundation, a substrate; into wax, into the “hymen”, the membrane of /de/piction. To paraphrase Derrida: The original impression, the impression in the primal wax, can be unerased.... And yet what is represented by untouched wax, prior to any possible impression, outside time which is everything that might influence it, in the moment of formation... anachronistically and anachronistic and thus indeterminate, carrying no meaning, let alone formation in the wax.... You could say it is a sort of unique “realism” – not surrealism but a realism that is not mimetic or imitative but a naive mirroring of things; in the psyche, in images. In Šalamun’s work, what is important is the fusion with the plains that glows in quiet intense colours. The pulse of the brush strokes, the deposit of paint not subordinate to the painted forms, everything merged, fused into one sign that is open and comprehensible but also mysterious. Painted reality, the depicted world requires neither security nor force since it is completely closed and self-sufficient.

No awe, no pursuit; no curiosity or insight. A world of safety, identity, repetition; where nothing is lost. Nothing is missing and also nothing takes place. The image, if finished, defined, a singular and remote form (though always repeating), indifferent to other forms and content. It is not serial or associative; it does not convey, mandate, or connect; it does not force nor does it suggest. Finished, it repeats itself, without replicas, without stories. A flattened surface that prevents /us/ from appropriating it and /re/turning it to the body. Substantive silence that says nothing; signs that invite but fail to signify. A hiding place for graphemes, the neutralization of distinctions, displacement. The obviousness of these “weak” images in chromatic fields is false, appearance and border that cannot be transgressed. A place that continually reveals itself in the disappearance of faces, and gazing into a distance where the space of hystere widens into infinity, spaces of an internal image. The cunning of visual representation, the mystery of the chromatic veil where there are no differences, antinomies, polarizations, nor genealogy. That is why the painting gives the viewer a feeling of nostalgic reminiscence, of oblivion. An apparition, fictitiousness that liberates the gaze and holds the space so it doesn’t collapse in on itself; that intoxicates and reflects us; that expands the space of Mediterranean senses and the experience of the sky and the sea on a clearly delineated horizon.

The image is placid, situated in a classical frame. It does not transgress the frame, does not leave the canvas. There is a clear division between inside and outside. Everything is conceived within the frame, captured in itself, in the flow, in the texture; everything is /already/ and is /not yet/, like the undulation of a veil which radiates in the light of the painting. The texture – flow – of chromatic deposits that hide nothing but the fundamental desire of the artist: to paint the impulse of light. In the ur-visual carrier thus understood resides a new concept of the radiation of light and the gaze; the image is no longer the painted inner-outer world but rather an intermediate space that is no longer translatable into a different language; it is the poetic screen as a “folding screen” or “curtain” for the painting. It is not the translation of objects into the figurative, but rather the revelation of spaces that do not actually exist but seethe, emerging from everywhere, like a living mobile thing.

In Šalamun’s works, reality as a factual totality is irrelevant, exogenous to the work of art. All that is important is the instant of the sign, form, style and manner that are connected with comfort and pleasure. The repetition of the ur-cultural model is reality in absentia and nevertheless these images are not the expression of an absent world. In truth, they are traumatic images that are presented by a passive but integral subject. With the concept of trauma, of course, we are thinking of the dreams of reality, that /according to Lacan/ we do not have the power to assimilate or depict; images that, repeated, conjure visions of our Desires. It has to do with the “instant of trauma that reminds us”; it has to do with the idea of another space and the timeless point between perception and consciousness; with the intoxication and enjoyment of beauty. Šalamun’s images are the “curtains” and “veils” discussed in Lacan’s work, the curtain-stain in which the subject recognizes itself, sees itself as a subject. Perhaps the curtain is less appropriate for signifying these images because we always must think of what the painting-curtain hides, that is, of the concealed object, the place of concealment, the reality of secrecy. The veil is a more adequate expression because it speaks from the self and for the self, as self-same /Selbstein/, that is of a real thing or relationship that is sufficient in and of itself. As far as light is concerned, the painter is a master of expression, pursuit, and discovery: light as an object (a fundamental basic “thing”) and as a theme that, in his production, that is his paintings, pursues and approaches, grows near as a certain – unique and fatal – schism of his mission. Everything else, all that remains, is less, is insignificant: everything else: visual approaches and methods are subordinate to these basic themes and tasks, to the mission of the paintings and the art of painting.

In Šalamun’s work, we see depiction as a function of the image in relation to the gaze, which makes it possible to speak about so-called “scopic pulsion” wherein it is precisely our gaze that is the object which, to paraphrase Lacan from his Four Concepts of Psychoanalysis, we’ve consciously or unconsciously forgotten and yet it keeps returning as a field of pulsion; as a fluid mechanism that survives each and every splintering and sustains all dividing principles. In keeping with Lacan’s analogy, a painting is a plank, something utterly flat that moves like an amoebae yet always creeps through. It is connected to what a sexual being stands to lose in sex, it is – like an amoebae in relation to sexual beings – something immortal. It survives every division, every dividing intervention; this plank, this organ, characterised by the fact that it doesn’t yet exist and is no less an organ, is libido. Libido as pure life-drive, the drive for immortal life, ceaseless life that needs no organs. A painting is an in-between space – a hymen – a ticket to enter ravines, the obscurity of caves, caverns where the unconscious rules. The painting as hymen then, as protective screen and intermediate wall (of virginity, according to Derrida in Le dissemination), a subtle curtain and a veil that guards the inside of histere.

Andrej Medved