Page 19 - TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS - volume IV

* How closely do these ideas relate to your creative process
and the actual act of creating the art itself?

The most important moment in my painting career was
the discovery of the optical painting procedures that
enable my paintings to radiate color light. In my creative
process, I am interested above all in those optical

procedures that enable the generation of color light in
my paintings. I do not show to the observer the painted
light but the real color light that is created by such a
painting composition when it generates the radiation of

the non-material part of my painting. In a similar way
that Dan Flavin does it. Only that he activates the light
using a bulb and electric power, while I generate the
color light and radiation of color in a natural, somehow

sublime way.

If Flavin produces light in an “electrical” way, in my
paintings the color light is produced in an “unplugged”

way. In my paintings, the color light is created as a
reflection of an intensive paint color that appears on
the edges or rear parts of the paintings and that the
observer cannot see directly when it is reflected on

the wall. This is enabled by a special structuring of
my paintings that I have been developing intensively
in the last two decades, since the mid-90s, and that
enables such transformation of the color material into

the color light.

My procedure of creating a painting composition thus
includes the process of dematerialization of the material

part of the painting. This could be compared to the
procedures of visual communication used by James
Turrell. His creative process consists of a “condensation”
of the optical experience of light. This process involves

some kind of materialization of the light, which in my
creation moves in the opposite direction. In my creation,
I expose the material character of the image to the
process of dematerialization and the material becomes

the light. Turrell and I are both interested in the light as
the essential part of communication with the audience
and as the magical feature of the transformation of the
material world. However, he is interested in this in a

monumental way and I in a more intimate way.

VH (5, D1) (DIPTYCH), 1999 WOOD, OIL ON CANVAS 47.2X6.2X4.7 IN. | 120X16X12 CM.

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