Eugen Borkovsky: WHITE EXHIBITION, FEACTALS; Arboreusi 2010.

FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, HR, 2010.

THE WHITE EXIBITION

In deep discretion of white non-color, by delicately weaving the spatial drawing and modelling the untouchability of the picture, Borkovsky approaches Rijeka with a poetic minimalism. After a break, in the city of all his beginings in the space of the gallery Kortil Eugen's works harmonize by means of rythm of suppressed acoustics in complete white and the complete pure.

Clear verticals articulate themselves as graphemes under the burden of lightness in their meditated versions. The text is created from the curved handwriting of a thin,delicate and porous wire page up to the forms which in his case reach an ideogramic status. Something already known, that endures - therefore signifies, verified by time and a sense of familiarity.

How did this script grow? From which language? Who is adressed by the message? Who does it actually communicate with?

You might say, that from the very beggining it transcribes a borderline of the displayed and the hidden, of the modern and traditional and the unformally exploratory which does not flinch from improvisation. Borkovsky's language was never a bound set of graphemes to the obstinate grammar of the visual (or any other) culture. It branched out from the biomorphic structure only sometimes tackling the artificial syntax of one who strayed from the garden of finiteness into the closed space of the atelier.

In all these years there was not a moment in which the author renounced the naturalness, but he did, in time, cultivate and sophisticate the elegance of the branch, the day, the forest, life.

Bound to the estetic, bound to the sharp gesture of the natural cut (for example a branch) in accord with tree tops, clouds and meditations he generated from an abstract game, from the autonomy of self-expression to the respect of his own language where he put his faith and which now communicates in return. In a word, this is mature, explicit, sublime poetics.

How was the language shaped into a script? How did the voices of expression become unlimited messages of a limited number of visual symbols? It appears that the time invested, has payed off. Borkovsky has grown to the authorship which by the act of begining does not anticipate the definition of the end, and every ending of every work is a canonic transmision towards something oposite to itself, but entirely compliant.

When we discuss Eugen's new cycle, we discuss whiteness. Silence. Curvature. The only concreteness of the world, which appears as an illusion, which warms along the void of coldness, which buckles with virtuosity with every new moment into its anthitesis. It is a misterious path from a snow flake to frozen ice covers, a misterious path of a language that never says anything specific, yet is recognizable in every language in the world: white!

Figuratively, the world is growing from a frozen rootlessness as an association to: flowers, mirrors, japanese papers written with discrete gesture, disposed baskets full of picked branches, architectonic passages and obstacles which melodically justify themselves to the world that they do not resemble. The space is filled with figures as an artificial forest or a wonderous city. That which is icy does not renounce the warmth, instead it comes to existance through the language, which even if it tried can not be more silent.

Methodologically, these are the years of equal axioms. There is nothing here that in Borkovsky's work has not always been present. There is nothing here that we already do not know perfectly - supposed that we know his previous works. Not one single new (reference) point of formulation has been introduced, but the diversity of the same has branched out up to the possibility of writing bio-morphic traces in wire books by means of minimal intervention.

All this life in Istria, all this time spent in exaltation of a non-imposed solitude, somewhere in the outskirts of people, in the epicentre of his own fascination with great urban turmoil (which deposited all its hidden and recycled truths of possible worlds with tides of countless departures), to the line between being and awakeness, through all of his creative path Eugen has caused excitement with activities that involve numerous people. He used this extrovert creative path as a paravane behind which a "cobwebbish" pantomime of perception took place, as well as the dance of the eye on bearly visible edges of the world with no intention to gain consciousness through real sociability. In this sense his works can be compared to a tip toe walk, a whisper which is afraid to startle itself. This is the essence of his works.

''Cobwebbish'' rooms of solitude and wakefullness, are beyond the world in wich the artist participates but renounces with the first contact with shaping,drawing, speaking, colouring and non-colouring.

Finally, everything that stands in front of us tries to be invisible. Precisely in this poetics of steam, gas, moisture it swirls into a bearly tangible matter. If we were to compare it with the branches he started with, having his script intended for art, we would come to the steam that emanates from the earth, to an earthly layer invisible to the naked eye, which the author collects and then stores into a herbarium, using his touch to shape a new whiteness which in spite of everything appeares to be miraculously concrete concidering the immateriality of steam and breath that witness an outer winter and an inner warmth.

Ph.D. Nataša Šegota Lah, January 2010.

Prijevod: Leni Raucher

White exhibition, performance: Žak Valenta, Rijeka, 2011.

FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, HR, 2010.

Oblaci / FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, HR, 2010.

GESTA, FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, HR, 2010.

GESTA; FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Kortil, Rijeka, HR, 2010.

FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Palach, Rijeka, HR, 2009.

FRACTALS; WHITE EXHIBITION, Galerija Zvonimir, Zagreb, HR, 2010.

If we accept the notion that a significant part of contemporary art has become increasingly sensitive to the ecological and meditative quality in artistic creation, we will recognize Eugen Borkovsky’s body of work as exceptionally well-synchronized with today’s trends. Namely, after a long time of putting emphasis, more or less rigidly, on the socio-ideological and political components of artwork, over the last ten years European art, particularly in Austria, Italy and Germany, has experienced a great comeback of land art as an essential need for the direct inclusion of nature into the artistic concept. However, the differences among an artistic intervention in nature, a transportation of a segment of live nature into a controlled gallery space, and an artificial mimicry of vegetal forms in the same space are not necessarily incompatible and do not carry an entirely different artistic message.

Although conceived in a different time and context, Giuseppe Penone’s installation/ambience from the first half of the 1980s entitled Landscape of Vegetal Gesture can be taken as a starting point for most of the later ecologically aware artistic gestures. A healthy longing for some past, happier times, when people were an integral part of nature, will mentally connect Penone and Borkovsky more than two decades later. Although Penone’s segments of real plants in jars mimic the human form while Borkovsky offers a bare and artificial image of nature which invokes some post-cataclysmic time, their intention is the same. In the world devoid of true connection with nature, where ecological actions and tendencies increasingly turn into profit and political points, there is little room for ingenuity and simplicity. In that sense, Eugen Borkovsky’s silvery white ambience opens many questions: must today nature around us be so artificially embellished as to re-capture observers’ attention, or are we actually standing in front of an artificially created installation of nature because everything else (alive) will cease to exist in the future? Borkovsky’s high level of craftsmanship suggests that re-creating nature heals and saves him, in this bare world, from the emptiness of existence since real, live nature has finally been successfully wiped out. We can no longer go out and see live vegetation; we can only look at the wooden and metal remains to help us restore our memory of the past.

In another, more optimistic interpretation, this ambience - with its tactile quality and an exceptional sensibility for a great range of light and shadow effects which the branch and net forms create in a clean gallery space – offers something we could call the ultimate mastery. This is obvious in the level of mastering the relationship between the artwork and the gallery space: they are perfectly blended into an inseparable, interdependent relationship where everything is, visually and spatially, included. In this ambience the artist has a secondary role and that puts the utmost emphasis on fine levels of artistic meaning. Open to various interpretations, this installation is free of any pretentiousness and hermetic pseudo-intellectual superstructure. Simultaneously, the artist has created pure visual and spatial beauty of form and has thus reached the ultimate contemplative and meditative quality, be it real or utopian.

Iva Korbler, January 2010