Ivo Prančič

This selection of works on paper is facing the public for the first time. It represents the artist's most intimate set of creations, which occupy a special place in his creative process. Perhaps they could even be distinguished from the narrow definition of a creative process as the process of creating a (panel) painting. Their status could best be described as sharpening of a pencil - preparing or grinding a tool, a kind of pre-realization phase of studio work.

All works on paper are of the same size, painted on standard B-1 format sheets of medium-quality cardboard. The mixture of oil, pigments and turpentine betrays the function of such works, intended for the future realization of a panel painting. Cardboard as a cheap base largely ensures the artist's ease of work since mistakes cannot be corrected and such "drawn" works can easily be thrown away. In the process of creating a painted surface, the painter explores the properties of materials, experiments with their manipulation and interaction. In this way, he accumulates knowledge and experience about the properties and effects of materials, their bonding and possible repulsion. Such a research-experimental activity equates the artist's studio with a laboratory. For a painter, such a method also means learning, honing his craft, shaping and transforming his sensibility, and testing the limits of the possible. Prančič's works on paper in this selection are the result of the initial phase of studio work, when all possibilities are open. This is a whirlwind of ideas and procedures, in which the rational control is minimal, and the means of expression can be anything that is within reach. Judgment, selection and evaluation come to the fore only at the end.

The experimental character is also revealed by interventions that are not found anywhere else in Prančič's oeuvre. Humor, irony, sarcasm and the artist's ideological values ​​are triggered by associations from the contemporary cultural milieu. The painter uncompromisingly insists on their multifaceted meanings, but The Sower(exceptionally titled in Slovenian!) certainly refers to the discourse on this national symbol, which began already at the time of Slovenian independence. TheKoala in Space is an image that we associate with a teddy bear from the NSK country. Pandemic / Allergic draws attention to the essential difference between subjects who are addressed by the same ailment, and to the findings of health statistics that allergies have reached pandemic proportions in the current century. Wuhan Baby includes a red emblem on the head of a hanging bat, the "culprit" for the outbreak of the pandemic, which has human legs. These somewhat more specific signs are a novelty in Prančič's painting, which even more concretely expand the share of mental concepts at the expense of pure modernist visual effect. They prove that the artist cannot escape his time and accepts such concessions due to the changes that art and visual culture are experiencing in this millennium.

Ivo Prančič's experimental works on paper are collected in a studio folder, an archive of ideas and experiences. When the artist goes through it, he can develop certain ideas, discoveries and insights as the reflection gradually intensifies. In his longing to experience the sublime, with a universal message and an appeal to the individual, Prančič's abstract paintings are the last echo of Enlightenment humanism, which experienced its final catastrophe in the intertribal massacres and humanitarian catastrophes of Africa, in the Middle Eastern urbicides, on the Ukrainian fronts and with the genocide in Gaza.

Selection of works and exhibition set-up
Ivo Prančič

Author of the text
Andrej Smrekar

Project leader
Bernarda Stenovec

Exhibits in exhibition
Narodna galerija, Ivo Prančič

The project was supported by