Pl Author: Weronika Panasewicz
The exhibition entitled The Near and the Elsewhere, curated by Sonja Zavrtanik, was specifically prepared for Škuc Gallery in Ljubljana. In contrast, in Eškinja’s previous work, the premise of his project was not an interior or gallery space, but contemporary city, within which he confronts us with non-places, which are characteristic of the supermodernity of the contemporary world. According to French anthropologist Marc Augé, non-site is an anonymous, imperceptible place that we do not identify with, which we dispassionately and mechanically leave in a rush, and which we treat exclusively as a transit on the way to another destination. They are also abandoned places without cultural tradition, like highways, airports and shopping centres. In those places contemporary people spend increasingly more time. With his objects and one installations Eškinja transfers us to such places.
On the one hand, such places are familiar, because we all know bus stops or garden swings, on the other hand, everywhere (or perhaps better to say “elsewhere” to alluded to the title of the exhibition) they are anonymous and always the same. This “familiar” part is constructed in the form of very sophisticated mural “drawings”. Eškinja uses simple, inexpensive materials, such as floral wallpapers, vintage arm-chair, lamp and electric cables. He “performs” the objects and situations, catching them in their intimate and silent transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional formal appearance. Eškinja defines another quality that goes beyond physical aspects and enters the register of the imaginative and the imperceptible. The simplicity of form is an aesthetic quality that opens up a possibility for manipulating a meaning. The tension between multiplicity and void constitutes one of the most important aspects of Eškinja’s “mural labels” and seemingly furniture installations.
In a way we could trace a continuity between Eškinja’s work and the Renaissance to Arts and Crafts Movement illusionistic tradition, expressed in the anamorphic representations or trompe l’oeil, or through the use of perspective as a tool to control the gaze. Just as the artists from the Renaissance used perspective in order to create perfect, even if illusory, space, installations of the Croatian artist create the illusion of the visible.
These objects remind me of the works of a young Polish artist, Karol Radziszewski. In 2007, at this solo exhibition entitled I’ve always wanted… at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw, he showed a part of his graduation work, an installation called Home. In this “composition in space” Radziszewski completely changed his parents’ house in Białystok. One characteristic motif completely dominated the entire space. It was a floral ornament, which Radziszewski remembered from his childhood – in his family home the curtains and the furniture were covered by the same pattern. The artist created a monumental floral mural in his parents’ house. It looked like a fancy box of candies. This work was very particular and expressive. Home as a site and non-site. This made it similar to Eškinja’s works, which are a sort of in-between state, and it is precisely the key aspect of Croatian artist’s work: maintaining permanently a paradoxical equilibrium between material world and conceptual sphere.
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