academic painter
| GLANCE BEYOND The genesis of SANDI CERVEK's painting is universal; in the all-embracing spiritual and semantic sense I perceive his work as real and extremely deliberate search for absolute plastic and spiritual values. It is not only on opus, which, to be short, conjures up a "walk", a thoughtful and plastic motion on the verge of the deepest, but also obliges us to view his paintings as the ancient "stone of wisdom", which only an artist is capable of creating as a comprehensible field of perception. After all hat we have to deal with is a commitment to "pure" research of the secrets of existance and fullfilment. The so called formal analysis of Cervek's paintings has up to the present moment turned out to be a means, too defective and humble for us to be able to comprehend the essence of his endevours. The application of the terminology of modernism and post-modernism as a statistical means of culturological vocation has up to now failed to offer useful preceptive width to answer the question: What is it that the paintings offer Cervek's work and creativity urge me to put some of the questions a different perspective. I know for a fact that Cervek is an artist who is dead serious about his own principles, i. e. rules which make it possible for him to express the lucid projection of immanent complexes. In the past decade, characterised by a quite consistent opus, this very same opus is quite unknown to the public of Europe and the rest of the world, aware and fond of plastic arts, thus it is ignorant of the messages such an opus might convey. It is nonethe- less quite obvious that from the plastic and theoretic point of view we have to deal with elements that make it possible for Cervek to distinguish himself from the average of the post-modernism. One cannot help but point out that his painting opens for us a glance into the worlds, which we have neglected for too long a period od time, although they are inevitable media which lead us to the very brink where we can take a glance beyond. Although this assertion might seem quite heretic to some it was absolutely necessary for it to be uttered and it will have to be confirmed in a few decades, if ever. From the very beginning, marked by his works from the period right after the year of 1985, the space of the painting has been filled by stories of extremely personal iconography, which, already at the time, have started to unveil his characteristic dramaturgy of view. A very specific existential attitude of the artist, almost a visionariness has at the time come to the point of touching a very specific European historical memory. The development of civilization of over a millennium, encodded into easily recognizable carriers of meaning, probably means a precise identification with the artistic movements, which have in the long course of the historic search ended in being the images of the view within. What it was really about was the introduction and the establishment of the premisses of classical modernism, "conditio sine qua non", although the plastic expression tended to defy the chains of various "isms". This has made it possible for Cervek to step into the realms of the engaged and inevitable critical response to a stunted state of mind which reeked of mediocrity. On the other hand the violent revolt against the conventions of the time was not reflected in demonstrative bawling although the artist seemed to predict it in his own special way. The surge of social changes at the end of the 80's has confirmed and established a new allegory of the world, which could be anticipated in Cervek's paintings, created a few years earlier, which on the one hand are calm yet rapped in a poise of spasmodic revolt and full of emotionally charged images of revolt on the other hand. What they were really about was a latent imperative, a warning, calling very seriously for self-awareness to be the inevitable point of comprehension. But the vision of decay still lingers on. Cervek seems to be an extremely sensitive observer thus he has reacted to the almost pestilential society deviations of the "outside world" in that he has brushed them off in his very own way, thereby realizing, being a thorough explorer of the human soul, one's very own fullfilment can only be realized by a deliberate system of messages, which might seem hermetic at first, and he has since then consistently tried to develop it, bringing it to its present depths, incomprehensible as they might seem to us. Through a deliberate intervention into the field of the painting he has declared himself a researcher of metaphysical immannce, which has further confirmed his charismatic existential radicalism for it obviously meant an indispensable deviation from recognizable iconographic, i. e. semantic markers, the reference points of which not only declare the artist the heir of modernism but also establish him as a follower of some sort of Post-Art Noveau. The opus that I have tried my best to understand in my own way and give a summarized and commi- ted, i.e. personal view (Janez Balazic, Likovne besede, No. 25, Lj ublj ana,1993, page 27-30) confirms that Cervek has succeeded in accomplishing at least two things: on the one hand he has systematically developed the "dramaturgy of; view" in his paintings, which is based on the introduction of light as the alchemical means, the function of which is purely meditative, and which nonetheless leads to purer dispositions of a message; on the other hand Cervek has come very close to the level where the painting exists as non-material field of energy, which leads one to the opinion that he has accomplished not only a tectonically plastic but also a philosophical transition, for in his "paintings" one can clearly see the presence of the archetype of the material, cosmic and meditative space. The way this is realized in his works, and the degree of experience the artist has been able to reach, is unveiled by the fact that the given view does not offer the definite image. The perpetualrhetorics of view represents the code of entering the painting. When one feels that one has large suceeded to put together the image where the glitter and brightness shift as if the image were gold disk of an icon, the transition into the circuit od cosmic vibrations is triggered. I am not sure that one can simplify the fact that Cervek searches for coexistance of cosmic energies in his paintings. I am sure, however, that through the means of a truly unique plastic communication system he has defined himself as a magician, as a mediator of comprehension of the infinitlveness existance and the urgent need to retrieve the cosmic memory, where it is not possible at all to presribe the way which might lead us to the truth of immortal, for they have probably already been inscribed into our cosmic genes. The fears of life stories originate from the inability to face the simple, yet most definite fact, that we are not the only ones, merely from yesterday, maybe lasting till tomorrow. The secret is also spun into Cervek's latest paintings which may still offer a number of ways, not in this or that external appearance, but in those higher sounds, which at first we fear, then try to chase off and finally get rid of. But the way starts there and maybe it it leads beyond. Janez Balazic
|
info@creativ.si