Aleksander Velišček, “BENVENUTI IN TEMPI INTERESSANTI”

Room 11
Invited by Andrea Bianconi

I like to think of the stairs that connect the two floors of Casa Testori (where my paintings were located) as a metaphor for the two levels at the basis of my painting process: obstinacy and investigation.
Painting is continuous material stratification (obstinacy) that thickens day after day on the canvas, revealing (like an investigation) expressions, concepts and sensations of shapes and colours. Paraphrasing Francis Bacon: “you have to try to pack a lot of things into every single brushstroke”.
Among the works exhibited at Giorni Felici was a paradoxical work: the portrait of my friend Kresnik, a little guy I love very much, portrayed as a five-metre giant. A necessary tribute to a dear person with whom I shared the years of study in Venice.
Pleasure, together with excitement and the eager pursuit of success and popularity are the focus of my latest works.
The intention was to bring to the surface the vacuous shrillness of everyday reality. The most unreasonable contemporary desires have replaced the natural ones. We live our time as a ‘theatre of the absurd’: we feel like protagonists and at the same time strangers in the collective drama of modern society. I am talking about politics and power – the economic one of course, but also the media power of images, representations now devoted exclusively to mass commodification. I try to move like a tightrope walker on that thin line suspended in the void that divides fiction and reality. I want to load the canvases and faces of my characters with matter and poison, in an attempt to make my ideals solid and dangerous.

Aleksander Velišček was born in 1982 in Šempeter Pri Gorici, (Slovenia). He lives and works between Nova Gorica and Venice.