AMBIENT XIII / AMBIENCE XIII

Arjan Pregl

1973, Ljubljana, Slovenia

A Five-Minute Revolutions, 2014

pencil and oil on canvas

Statuettes, 2014

polymer clay

Arjan Pregl’s artistic practice expands into social space, making use of and critically reflecting (on) various available media. Taking into consideration his own role in society, Pregl develops critical, political, and resistance strategies. In his paintings he builds open, internally contradictory, heteronomous, and multilayered structures based on the tensions between the visual (and sometimes textual and conceptual) fragments. The structure of the painting A Five-Minute Revolution has been greatly influenced by the possibilities of technical production and manipulation. The structure of the pictorial field is based on a photograph of a public sculpture by Drago Tršar. Pregl has “removed” the monument, replacing it with an appropriately enlarged decorative “hobby” sculpture. Such technical reproduction does not exclude manual work: the painting was produced in the traditional techniques of pencil and oil on canvas, but the role and significance of the procedure has been considerably altered in and by the new context. Replacing the emotionally and polemically charged monument with a banal abstract color mass made from Fimo modeling clay is a critical and ironic reference to the relativism of aesthetics and the political revisionism of our time and place.