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The exhibited series of paintings by the versatile artist Sašo Vrabič, titled “In the Cloud,” offers an insight into the artist’s subtle yet discernible contemplation on human nature and its significant connection to technology. The format of the presented paintings mimics the shape of standardized smartphone screens. Unlike the artist’s other recognizable works where technology is directly depicted alongside the ambivalent human, this series leans towards the perspective of his habitat—nature, urban environments, underwater impressions, and dreamy clouds. Despite the visual absence of digital components, technological attributes, and the medium’s classical painting form, the series “In the Cloud” appears as a reproduced, virally filtered consumer content.

The depicted mountain landscapes, views of the sky, sunsets, roadside rest stops, and momentary underwater glimpses of weightless bodies originate from the artist’s photographs. Some works subtly incorporate collaged East Asian newspapers, while others feature contrastingly colored frame edges. All the paintings share carefully painted, thoughtful inscriptions that elevate the series’ content and iconographic analysis to a more complex and conceptual level. The selected fonts of various sizes at the bottom edge of the paintings function as recognizable subtitles describing sounds. In paintings where a melody is indicated in the subtitle, it is surrounded by a musical note symbol, while other sounds, such as buzzing, beeping, human noise, or animal calls, are placed within square brackets. They function similarly to television series and films, where subtitles inform the viewer about ambient sounds alongside speech. Each painting in the series thus gains an additional dimension of sound, which often completely transforms its atmosphere and alters the seemingly simple content.

The works are marked by a multi-layered continuous ambiguity. This is expressed through the subtitles, already evident in the multifaceted reading of the artwork. Even if the eye perceives calming, timeless underwater movement of human bodies in blue hues, the suggested contradictory sound of an annoying computer beep forces the viewer to imagine the soundscape while looking at the painting. This can easily change the experience of consuming the painting; a carefree vacation on a turquoise coast turns into an unsettling, anxiety-filled office occupation, a night visit to a rest stop gains a dark touch of a genre computer game, and a flock of playful birds is unnaturally stripped of any chirping or wing flapping. In many cases, it is challenging to determine whether the atmosphere of the painting is meditative, relaxing, and peaceful or simultaneously frightening, enigmatic, even menacing. Ambiguity also manifests through the painted subtitles, which, while meaningful, carry refined visual qualities in the chosen typography. The decision to write them only in English simultaneously alludes to the real, English-oriented globalized world, where Slovenian language shamelessly fades and is entirely absent in digital content. The mixing of English and Slovenian occurs in the ambivalent titles, which are very imaginative, sometimes humorous, and sincere. The title “Terra Bites,” for example, refers to the computer unit for expressing data quantity, while also hinting at a potential Earthly bite. Similarly, the works “Vladimir’s Forest” and “Positions of Power” bring a concealed hint of environmental disasters, war, and cosmic invasion through their seemingly ordinary titles combined with subtitles and imagery.

Individual fragments of figures testify to the stories of absolute anonymous individuals. They are joined by majestic mountains, oceans, and endless skies. At their core, the artworks remain unburdened, imbued with calm energy, pleasing color palettes, and relaxed fragments of subtle nature. Each painting is a separate ambient frame that comes to life with the prescribed sound in a vibrant hum, vibration, and tingling. Embraced by timelessness, they simultaneously convey a distinct emotional charge, melancholy, and growing unease, even depression. In their escapism and connection to technological impulses, they cautiously address the human fears of the modern world. The series “In the Cloud” thus demands gradual contemplation of each painting; the beauty of nature reconciled with the passing of time defined by white noise, muffled sounds, tranquility, and endless farewells. The rounded content of an imaginary final vacation thrives in the form of aesthetic frames, following the system of an addictive online streamer, allowing for endless cheap enjoyment of artistic lyrical content.

Maša Žekš

 

About the author

Sašo Vrabič (1974) graduated in painting in 1998 and earned a master’s degree in printmaking in 2001 from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. His most expressive works comment on the nature of contemporary information society and the dynamics of interpersonal communication. As an author, he has participated in numerous curated art events. His works are included in public collections such as MG+MSUM, the International Centre of Graphic Arts and the Parliament of the Republic of Slovenia in Ljubljana, the Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts in Slovenj Gradec, the Maribor Art Gallery, the Velenje Gallery, the Nova Gorica City Gallery, the Dolenjska Museum in Novo Mesto, the Imago Mundi collection of Luciano Benetton (Italy), and the World Bank Institutional Art Program (USA). He engages in painting and other forms of visual and sound art. He is represented by Gallery Y.

What does so-called pure graphics represent?

A selection of graphic works by Mag. of Graphics, Dr. Igor Konjušak, Zagreb

Two facts left a strong impression in the exhibition spaces of Ljubljana: at the Ljubljana Society of Fine Artists on Breg 22, where, on the initiative of Mag. of Graphics and Professor, selected graphic works from Slovenian and pedagogical art academies were exhibited, as well as selected works by a Ljubljana graduate and professor of graphics at the Sarajevo Academy, together with selected graduates in October 2023. At the same time, in the spaces of Nova Univerza on Mestni Trg, graphic prints by Mag. and Prof. Nevenka Arbanas from Zagreb were presented this year.

Adapted greyness, restrained blackness, symmetry, more or less clear black lines, which we discovered as a kind of uniform lines at the first mentioned exhibition in selected graphics, mentored by academic painter and graphic artist Dževad Hozo, one of the most prominent representatives of the Ljubljana Graphic School and a student of Prof. Riko Debenjak. Hozo left Ljubljana together with his colleague and wife, academic painter Metka Kraigher. Despite difficult times, both held their pedagogical positions at the new Sarajevo Academy until their deaths.

We must not forget that strong ties remained between the two academies. At the Sarajevo Academy, the late Prof. Dr. Stane Bernik also collaborated for many years as a professor of art theory and design. Hozo also participated in numerous exhibitions at home and abroad as a representative of the Ljubljana Graphic School, as well as in solo presentations from Ljubljana and Bremen to São Paulo, where I, as his generational critic counterpart, accompanied him as one of the most convincing representatives of the Ljubljana Graphic School, whose prominence in the international art scene was first acknowledged by the young Italian critic Lea Vergine. Let us also not forget to mention Hozo’s book publications—his theories on intaglio printing and beyond, in encyclopedic scope, published by Mladinska Knjiga.

I feel that there has been enough introduction and warnings about the current happenings in our space, which somehow, whether intentionally or not, are dedicated to the future graphic biennale, which is expected to once again find its home in the spaces of our Modern Gallery next year.

We have in front of us about 15 new graphic prints, all in the drypoint technique, by Igor Konjušak. His biography states that this Zagreb student completed his master’s degree in 2012 at the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts under Dževad Hozo. The latest works of the aforementioned Prof. Nevenka Arbanas in Ljubljana have already represented a certain type of monumentality, a result of the active collaboration of her colleague Igor Konjušak. The cause of this sensation was the size, the expansiveness, and the abstract restlessness and line strokes that seemed endless.

Igor Konjušak is essentially both an important and modest continuer, partly as a collaborator with his long-time Zagreb professor, and partly as an active participant in Croatian triennials of graphics and watercolor, perhaps also if we consider the revival (redivivus) of these ancient techniques. More on this could be learned in the monograph of the Splitski Brevijar by the renowned connoisseur, art historian, and critic Ivo Šimut Banov. Our artist also found the time to earn a Ph.D. under Prof. Ivica Šiško.

After discovering several recognizable homages to Dževad Hozo and Bogdan Borčić among the exhibited works, we uncover exceptional raster details, playful moments that pause in shadows, in reflectiveness and non-alienation simultaneously—a kind of incompleteness of Borčić’s graphics.

When we initially mentioned pure graphics, we can now say that this purity seems endless, that the author knows how to measure it, overlay it, withdraw it, and immediately abandon it. Do we dare to claim that this is a message of a new reality, or is it still a reminiscence of the present?

Aleksander Bassin

 

About the author

Igor Konjušak was born in 1957 in Zagreb. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, in the Department of Graphics, under the mentorship of Prof. Dževad Hozo, and in 2012, he completed his master’s degree under the same professor. He contributed to the production of two feature-length animated films, The Wonderful Forest and The Magician’s Hat, for Croatia Film.

From 1988 until the end of 1996, he designed crystal products for a glass factory. To date, he has exhibited in more than twenty solo exhibitions and around three hundred group exhibitions. He has published twenty portfolios of graphic works, both as solo and collaborative projects. He has participated in approximately seventy workshops in Croatia and abroad.

He has given numerous lectures at the National and University Library in Zagreb, the Print Cabinet of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and in the town of Bogenšperg in Slovenia. He regularly participates in the Splitgraphic biennales, Croatian graphic triennials, and the Croatian watercolor triennial. He has exhibited in Poland, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2008, his monograph, authored by Ivo Šimat Banov, was published by Splitski Brevijar.

He has been a member of various professional associations, such as the Croatian Society of Film Workers, Likum, and HZSU. In 1989, he received the first prize for illustration on the theme “The Fight Against Alcoholism and Other Addictions” in Sarajevo. He earned his doctorate in 2016 and is currently employed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.

Alojz Konec