"TRANSCODER. BEFORE AND AFTER MEDIA IN ABSTRACTION"

Artists: Olga Tobreluts, Russia, & Mice Jankulowski, Northern Macedonia
Curators: Zsolt Petrani, Hungary, and Cornelia Koneska, Northern Macedonia

The exhibition addresses the problem of the relationship of painting and historical-artistic stereotypes. Being one of the traditional forms of art, painting is associated with the practice of two-dimensional images and its ability to express reality, vision, light, emotions. In modern painting, two approaches clash: the traditional one, when the artist uses a brush, paint, canvas to look for new possibilities for creating an image, and the innovative one, reflecting the influence of media images that undermine our faith in truth, politics, and reality.

The name of the exhibition refers to the thoughts of the philosopher Paul Vilirio about the meaning of the changed image and his new relationship with the world. “Transcoding” is based on the fact that the artistic image is always related to the code, which acts as the basis for its understanding. At the end of the 20th century, under the influence of the media, these codes changed, which cannot be ignored when interpreting the painting, even if the picture was painted in oil in a traditional manner or uses media and computer images.

Exhibition “Transcoder. Before and After Media in Abstraction ”pushes the approaches of two artists of different generations. Both authors - Mice Jankulowski (born in 1954) and Olga Tobreluts (born in 1970) - work in painting technique, but use different artistic methods.

The artistic manner of Jankulowski dates back to the language of abstract painting of the early 1970s. In a new series of paintings, the author focuses on its material aspect - on the texture of the surface of the canvas itself, its ability to clarify images differently, depending on lighting. The artist uses black monochrome painting to give an opportunity to feel its dynamic structure.

For Olga Tobreluts, who was one of the founders of the St. Petersburg New Academy of Fine Arts, the ideals of beauty are important. Turning to historical art values, she experimented a lot with digital processing of images based on photography. In recent years, the artist has returned to painting: her works are images of structures made of fractals, built using computer programs. Olga Tobreluts paints in traditional painting techniques, pointing out the importance of academic technology in creating works of art even in the computer age.

The exhibition confronts the work of these artists and in their relation to light. If the surface of the painting becomes the basis of expressiveness for Yankulovsky, Tobreluts achieves a light effect using traditional pigments and various color mixing, revealing the limitations of that set of computer program capabilities. In Yankulovsky painting, light becomes a tangible physical experience for the viewer, and in Tobreluts paintings it creates an illusionary effect.

Artists will present their work in the form of an installation resembling a palindrome, inside which the viewer is invited to reflect on the renewed value of the painting. The idea of “recoding” helps to consider many of the nuances of painting by Jankulowski and Tobreluts, to identify a critical position in relation to concepts: they will gain a new meaning if you approach them differently, analyzing all existing media and presenting the process of creating works.