SVEBOR VIDMAR
No title

Karas Gallery
Praška 4, Zagreb
HDLU

Opening, Friday, 05.03.2010. at 7pm 

05.03. - 28.03. 2010.

DUALISM HAS THE BLESSING OF THE ARTIST

Somewhere half way between Ireland and Arabia lies Zagreb, where Svebor Vidmar lives.  Painter, illustrator, curator, visual culture teacher, partaker of this time meagre in the things of the spirit. The geographical triad mentioned is a swirl of visual reasons,  mantras, contents, absences.  In principle there is no need to deal with traces, though the trace itself may coerce this.

We recall the sentence of Charles Baudelaire (from Rockets) which goes: “The arabesque is among all drawings the most refined.”  It is easy to deal with this statement looking at Svebor’s drawings. Ornament, arabesque, one artist, another artist, a third artist.  Similarities and kinships suggest the expression of a common truth, condition, time and message. But we shall continue along the path of the original cultivation of abstraction started by Svebor Vidmar.  By the way, comparative sight is full of pragmatic truths and claims.  Here we inevitably notice our western spirit, involved in the materialisation of the world of art. True enough, there is a spiritual programme at work in all.  Ireland has its codices, manuscripts with miniatures and monumental crosses that juxtapose the miniature to the sky.

Arabia, that is, Islamic culture, is completely shot through with abstraction, which functions as decorative and/or spiritual visual reading matter. A world of abstinence distant from us, but: the reigning multitudinousness of the West also includes such impulses and productions, even more so, as tradition proves. For example: a labyrinth signifies the allegory of human fate, from the Greeks to Mannerism. Often the focus has slipped away into the Spirit. The author’s drawings too do not retain the view upon the self, but have powerfully teleported him into the spiritual. This brings us closer to the essential, what has to be said when it’s about abstract drawing.  Figuration is de-concentration, we would say, without having made a value judgement. However, the spiritual condition is at work as soon as we move away forms related to the human world. A mental vibration seems not to have the contours of form, nor the situatedness of recognisable life. Although Vidmar derives from culture, figuration on the whole, he resorts to the message of abstraction, the arabesque.  It is a bold breakthrough since, put simply, our public has figural expectations.  With the appearance of a work of this kind comes the need to have it radically explained…

There, an article writer likes things to have a meaning. Without doubt, a fairly strong will has made this artistic selection.

Crossing over the frame is a symptom.  The overall effort of the artist is first of all located in confidence. The tautology of all the pieces at the exhibition suggests to us a certain culmination of gestures, intentions, ideas, wishes.  The title Untitled hits the spot. A break with figuration, but visible and put on display.  This is a chance made use of successfully to express the self, irrespective of the universal dualities.  An eloquent emptiness, a reckoning with focus, with hierarchy, which is common. Perhaps a bold waste of time. Apart from the visual topic of the arabesque being a story, still, the unflagging stories known to all are wanting.  For the occasional observer of Svebor’s drawings, this must be a plaintive story, the raptures of forms being missing.  But I highlight the choice, perhaps the compact behind this ascetic practice (asceticism on a human scale?).  We can look at Svebor’s drawings as we look into glass, or as we look at ourselves in the mirror, or as if we were looking at Malevich’s speaking whiteness.  All views are good/fruitful, the author is by our side, also by our side is our own feeling of a saucer-eyed being, a suite then around the moderate emptiness of lines, lines and lines.

Somewhere it has been said and written that drawing is a stronger and safer sign of the spirit than language (as sign system). To that extent, on this artistic occasion we can conclude that drawing represents the soul or the spiritual dimensions that the Logos only fulfils about, let’s say, 5% of the time. (Of course, numbers gladden, but more or less share the fate of language.)

The absence of figuration receives all figures, it is eloquent, the conceptuality of remaining at the frequencies that are the potencies of all forms.  Enough invisibility has been applied to be the warp of human placement into matter. Svebor’s drawings are documents of equilibrium. Since everything comes out of the spirit, the drawings that we see at the exhibition are a part, a representant of the primary, which has in its refined and minimalist and ascetic way touched on the secondary world of organised forms.  Other fine, visual circumstances of the actual pieces/drawings (the identical dimensions of the pieces, the similarity, the wanting titles, the symbolism of number, the symbolism in general, the transition to another visual aspect, the unframing of the frame) complement the mannerist charge in the spirit of the not so long ago neo-avant-gardes.

Vlado Martek

BIOGRAPHY

Svebor Vidmar was born on December 15, 1973, in Zagreb. He graduated at the Applied Art School in Zagreb in 1992, painting department, class of Duško Malešević.  In 1997 he received a scholarship to the Kulturzentrum BINZ 39, Scuol Switzerland.  In 1999 he took his degree in painting, education major, from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, class of Miroslav Šutej. In the same year, he received Zagrebačka Banka Prize for the best dissertation piece.  In 2000 he was accepted as a member of HDLU.  Since 2006 he has worked as manager of the Vladimir Filakovac Gallery in Zagreb. In 2008 he became a member of ULUPUH, section for applied painting, caricature, illustration, comic strip and cartoon film.  In his spare time he is into writing children’s stories.