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Amer Kobaslija
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Artists Statement
STUDIO PAINTINGS
It could be said that a studio is painter’s shrine, a place where one goes on a daily basis in order to practice their religion or their arts. There is a certain routine to this process: one goes in and performs the ritual, which consists of the act of painting as well as the thought process that goes with it, the meditative aspect of the work. The studio as a subject matter gives the painter a myriad of possibilities of how to approach it, how to perceive and deal with it. When painted, everything that is a part of the particular studio’s iconography - painter’s tools, finished works and the ones in progress, paint marks, memorabilia, books, cell phone and all the other equally (in) significant bits and pieces of information being visually described - all operate as windows, mental links into times and spaces that are of relevance to the artist, revealing themselves to the viewer’s eye, all at once. The application of the multilinear perspective empowers the viewer to perceive the scene almost in its entirety, from several angles at once. Apprehending the ceiling while, at the same time, gazing towards the floor creates a sensation of visual vortex. The viewer cannot resolutely place him or herself in a particular angle from where the room is observed; instead, it feels as if being at more than one location simultaneously. This compositional approach helps create a broader but also a more immediate experience of the subject. Here, time is compressed, and space, to paraphrase Bachelard, ‘becomes a container of countless memories.’ And although everything in these studios seems to be happening concurrently (all in sharp focus), one can open only one of these windows at a time - an analogy to the workings of mind. Perceived as such, the studio becomes a metaphorical reflection of the inner world of a painter, a visual diary, a chronicle of state of mind...
RESTROOM PAINTINGS
Like the studio paintings, the restroom paintings are meditations on the idea of mark-making. Paint, like dirt, is a trace left behind. Filth, stain, empty bottles, shattered glass, soda cans, cigarette butts and a multitude of other objects and marks – all left by the visitors to this public yet intimate place - are both protagonists and antagonists in this tale. The accidental marks and the stain on the vacant restroom floor are depicted not necessarily by the standard methods of realist painting; rather, the paint is mimicking the subject by behaving like the latter, layered in a manner that dirt gets built up. The paint pigment, destroyed by being deliberately mixed with an excessive dose of turpentine, soaks into the panel surface in the way urine soaks into the restroom floor. By reading into these characters the viewer is able to better understand the physical process of making the painting and in doing so fill in the missing parts as well as develop a narrative. It is about absence with evidence. The final result is an intimate but detached, beautiful yet vulgar, realistic and lyrical experience: a meditation on memory, poetics and phenomenology of space, and again - a meditation on the act of painting itself.
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