OTO RIMELE: Light and ladder
Oto Rimele, winner of the Prešeren Fund, full professor of painting at the Faculty of Education at the University of Maribor and one of the most prominent contemporary artists in Slovenia, will exhibit his drawings and painting objects marked by transparency, whose characteristic feature is that the classical painting field recedes into the edges and towards the back of the painting. With this shift of colour, the artist directs the reflection of light into the surroundings of the painting, which appears to the viewer as a coloured glow around the painting.
It is as if the very aura whose loss was predicted in the 1930s by Walter Benjamin in his famous text "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" has thus returned to the contemporary, objectified work of art.
The viewer may also think that this is a reminiscence of Hegel's "illumination of ideas", when in paintings he experiences a glimpse of the passing of the materiality of colour into an immaterial state: is auraticity possible again in the contemporary pictorial image? "The ladder is for the viewer's mind and the light for his soul. The former rises, the latter is to glow", the artist wrote somewhere.
Highlights from the exhibition: