Opening: 13 October 2021, 7-10 pm
Nothing new under the sun
Have you ever seen a real life murderous act? I have never witnessed one myself. What has always impressed me in movies about killers is their calmness directly after committing a murder. It is exactly after the shooting that you don’t have to attract attention.
Dino Zrnec is a killer. He meditates, acts and afterwards leaves calmly in cold blood. He is a ruthless and intimate artist.
For our first collaboration in September 2016, the artist produced a series of paintings articulated through micro-fractures of the canvas. Instead of making loud and redundant gestures Zrnec chooses silence. Micro-spatialism, a term I coined at the time describing very thin cracks in the canvases, micro-fractures with an ambiguous character. It communicates that the only possible way is a result somewhere between what the artist proposes and what happens by accident.
In this extreme present Dino is still sitting on the riverbank, he meditates, he watches over the water flow, and acts with constancy and awareness. We do not know whether the body will first appear along the river and this is not really the point to be discussed. Instead the main point is that it is very difficult to remain true to oneself, to follow the primordial impulse that animates one’s artistic research whilst at the same time to look around, to inhale and to be permeable. I won’t dwell much on this exhibition. This is certainly a body of works in which we see two souls, an Apollonian spirit and, if you like, a Dionysian one. We view a clean, balanced gesture on the one hand, and on the other, an accretion that embodies the character of a patient accumulation of thoughts.
Zrnec knows how to stop a moment before the declared and obvious bourgeois mockery. His approach is a concealed humour with often sinister overtones. You can see this in certain moments of his deep, disillusioned, austere and simultaneously thick painting, crass in a certain sense, but never truly voluptuous and never self-referential.
Zrnec’s painting is continuously characterised by a discreet, silent elegance, aimed at seducing in the etymological sense, se ducere, leading to oneself. It is a seduction that invites reflection and observation, not love. “Come to me but at the same time stay away from me.”
Our dialogue begins in 2016, when we were moved by a somewhat naive and expectant unawareness. Then time passed at supersonic speed. We find ourselves now, five years later, discussing a spirit that is disillusioned with greater awareness and in a much more proactive manner than the subject that animated us initially. During one of our final conversations, preparatory to this inauguration, we found ourselves smiling and realising that everything passes yet everything returns. “You have to let it go” states Zrnec.
I am unsure if Dino has absorbed anything from me over the years, I don’t wonder.
As far as I am concerned, I have learned from him to not insist too much, “to let it go” and to progress calmly and slowly absent from the scene of the crime. Nothing new under the sun.
Vincenzo Della Corte
