Art exhibition by Oto Rimele: Light and ladder
Oto Rimele, winner of the Prešeren Prize, full professor of painting at the Faculty of the University of Maribor and one of the most important contemporary artists in Slovenia, exhibits in the Gallery of the National Institute of Chemistry his drawings and painting objects characterised by transparency, which are characterised by the fact that the classical painting field recedes to the edges and into the background of the picture. With this colour shift, the artist directs the reflection of light into the environment of the painting, which appears to the viewer as a coloured glow around the painting.
It is as if the very aura whose loss Walter Benjamin predicted in the 1930s in his famous text "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is returning to the modern, objectified work of art.
The viewer might also think that it is a reminiscence of Hegel's "Enlightenment of Ideas" when he senses the transition of the materiality of colour into an immaterial state in paintings: is aura possible again in the contemporary painting? "The ladder is for the viewer's mind and the light for his soul. The first rises, the second shall shine," the artist wrote somewhere.