You are kindly invited to the opening of the exhibition on Friday, October 10, at 7 p.m. at the Gallery of Contemporary Art.
Čepin’s visual world is a world of the strange and dark. It is filled with scenes that exude a sense of some other time and space – as if they are coming from a kind of parallel world, governed by different laws, even though motifs and elements of reality are clearly discernible in them. His mysterious compositions, characterised by a fragmentary kaleidoscopic narrative, raise more questions than they answer. The interpretation of the merely hinted at, always open-ended stories, is constructed differently every time, depending on the imagination, experience, and that which has accumulated and is present in the inner space of each individual viewer. Enveloped in an unusual frozen timelessness, they function as psychological spaces or as spaces of gloomy, suspended expanses of dream visions and the unconscious that has floated to the surface. Dream, if you dare is the title among a multitude of others, cut out from daily newspapers, images, words, and phrases attached to the wall of his studio.
His distinctive artistic style and unique approach to visual storytelling, which he uses to draw viewers in and envelop them in an uncertain atmosphere that is both familiar and anxiously uncomfortable, was developed by Čepin early in his creative career, when, more than two decades ago, he entered the Slovenian art scene as a self-taught painter and immediately attracted attention. His canvases are populated by human figures or groups of figures that are usually set in a gloomy landscape. In recent years, the previously dominant muted tones have begun to give way to cleaner colour surfaces with a little more light, while the heavy, impastoed, distinctly thickened layers of paint with added wax and resin that characterised his earlier works have begun to recede. The scenes, often multiple in the same painting, unfold in a space marked by only a few more or less constant elements: a solitary building, always bare, dark trees, a grassy surface, a wide sky with subdued light, a mound and smoke, a crucifix. Figures often appear as if they come from different places and times, usually finding themselves together without any clear causality or logical connections. With individual details accentuated by colour and provocative or almost imperceptible finely drawn details, the mystery of the images is only heightened – it seems as if they hold the key to unravelling the enigma of the images. However, his canvases always convey an atmosphere of menace, a premonition that something sinister has already happened or is about to happen, which is always submerged in a kind of stagnation, a metaphysical silence – creating an uncanny sense of suspense in the paintings.
His works convey an atmosphere of the surprising and the incomprehensible, reminiscent of the films of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, in the twists and turns of a fairy-tale world or the images of dark romanticism – all of which, through the entangling of the real and the fantastical, have all influenced his way of visual thinking in one way or another. In them, we encounter a playfulness with quotations or reinterpretations of characters and motifs from art history, literature, and film (from the inexhaustible imagination of the Brothers Grimm, Lynch’s surrealistic horror film Eraserhead, the metaphorical Wizard of Oz, to Fragonard’s sensual Swing or the contemporary, hyperrealistic Ron Mueck). The artist places these in the context of contemporary society, using them to more or less directly problematise its state, misguided values, dark sides and deviations. To a large extent, he weaves scenes from his own intense dreams, as well as symbols and archetypes, into his paintings, along with completely mundane scenes and details, often drawing inspiration from daily newspapers and crime reports, as well as from the environment that surrounds him. He thus creates numerous associations, reflections, and possible interpretations, placing the viewer in the role of a meticulously precise researcher of the staged and an uncertain collector of meanings. However, Čepin does not achieve the feeling of the already seen, known, and familiar in the viewer only through suggestive references to creativity that has become deeply ingrained in a particular period and universal human consciousness, or by introducing everyday objects and scenes, which he always places in unusual combinations, relationships, and situations. It appears that his interest actually lies elsewhere. Namely, in creating a different experience and perception with a broad collection of an inextricable mixture of all of the above – which winds through his entire oeuvre, along with frequent repetitions of motifs. It seems that the suggestiveness and essential characteristic of his images lie primarily in their ability to touch us through the feeling of something completely different, something familiar—our own fears, traumatic experiences, obsessions, and fantasies, even those that reveal themselves to us in dreams but which we would never consciously acknowledge as our own. In this way, Čepin actually creates the bulk of the activity elsewhere – in the tension between the visual imagery of the paintings and the invisible, inner space of the viewer. It is precisely here, in this transition between the open and the possible, which he presents, and the specific and the intimate, which we, the viewers, construct ourselves, that he seems to succeed in establishing a kind of intermediate space of particularly active dialogue, as a result of which his images irresistibly captivate, fascinate, and attract us – while at the same time, by recognising what is inscribed within us, they can evoke a distinct unease and a pronounced sense of anxiety.
The exhibition Druga stran vetra (The Other Side of Wind) consists of Čepin’s more recent, largely new works: paintings ranging from large to small formats, as well as smaller objects created especially for this project, which engage in dialogue with the paintings. By combining the individual elements into a cohesive whole, Čepin has envisioned the exhibition as “a dreamlike, hypnotic odyssey, as a descent into a windy inner journey with reflections of everything that is going on in the outside world. As a space of the unease of nightmares, where there is no safety or certainty, as well as a metaphor of the time we live in”. It may well be that the world is merely the projection of the innermost and dreams are dreaming us – a question raised by the artist in one of his interviews and – while reflecting on the relationship between the unconscious and the material world at a certain moment, despite his consistent focus on scientific research into the psyche – one that was also asked by Jung.
Matej Čepin (1977, Celje) has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has received several awards for his work, among them second prize at the 4th Biennial of Small-Format Paintings in Ljutomer (2006) and the Grand Prix of the International Painting Ex-tempore in Piran (2009). Since 2017, he has held the status of an independent cultural worker. His paintings form part of the collections of several Slovenian galleries, including Piran Coastal Galleries, Murska Sobota Gallery, Ptuj City Gallery, the Center for Contemporary Arts Celje, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška in Slovenj Gradec, and the Ante Trstenjak Gallery in Ljutomer. Since 2019, he has also exhibited as a member of the artist collective Wild at Heart (Jurij Kalan, Aleksij Kobal, Silvester Plotajs-Sicoe, and Matej Čepin). He lives and works in Celje. Recent solo exhibitions include Reality Before Reality (Bežigrad Gallery 1, Ljubljana, 2024), Where We Come From, the Birds Sing a Beautiful Song (Kvartirna hiša, Celje, 2023), Happy Days (Ravne Gallery, Ravne na Koroškem, 2022), The Next Day: Wicked Witch of the West (Generali Gallery, Ljubljana, 2022), and The Next Day (Kibela, Maribor, 2021). He has also participated in several major group exhibitions, such as Figuralika. Selected Examples from Slovenian Art (Cukrarna, Ljubljana, 2023), Momental–mente: Living Pictures (Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, 2022), Painting Now! (Nova Gorica City Gallery, 2021), and The Unheard-of World I Have in My Head. Metamodernism and Metaromanticism in Slovenian Painting (Carinthian Gallery of Fine Arts, Slovenj Gradec, 2019).
The Celje Regional Museum – Center for Contemporary Arts
Curator of the exhibition: Irena Čerčnik
Text: Irena Čerčnik
Proofreading and translation: Lingua service
Graphic design: Neža Penca
Technical support: Matjaž Ernecl, Nada Šmid, Verica Zorko
Supported by: Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, Municipality of Celje
