AMBIENCE XX

Vinko Tušek

1936, Ljubljana – 2011, Kranj, Slovenia

Environment M-1, 2014 (1971)

partial reconstruction

painted wood, metal rods

Moderna galerija's national collection. Photo: Matija Pavlovec

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, while working as part of a group of artists dubbed the Neoconstructivists, painter Vinko Tušek (1936–2011) developed a conceptual connection between painting and space. The artist first addressed the issue of giving a painting the dimensions of a space in his paintings-sculptures, which were a way of painting with objects in space so that the (almost dream-like) painting-space, a three-dimensional surface, could be directly entered and walked through, explored from within. The new, reversed viewpoints that this allows give such spatialized paintings a temporal dimension; the image is no longer frozen. The viewers’ movement through it becomes a part of such a temporalized painting, although it can also produce exactly the opposite result if viewers get lost in the labyrinth of manifold fascinating impressions – their self-eradication, and with this, the eradication of space and time as a fundamental basis.

Tušek’s White Labyrinth (1970, in the courtyard of the Gorenjska Museum in Kranj), which does not survive, is considered the first conceptual environment in Slovenia. It was soon followed by Red-Blue-Spherical (1970), produced for the Neoconstructivists exhibition at the Moderna galerija, and composed of suspended round or spherical objects in a clear nod to the contemporary exploration of space (such as the 1969 Moon landing). Continuing in this vein, Environment M-1 also deals with the notion of “purity”: “pure” visuality and “pure” sensation(s), without any added meanings or deeper psychological layers. Tušek’s approach to these spaces or environments was, in his words, “strictly abstract,” although still in terms of painting rather than just art theory, that is to say, in terms of a surface of impressions (now often curving into space), which nonetheless entailed doing away with the frame of the painting and the space as a cube. In Environment M-1, unlike in the Red-Blue-Spherical, the individual elements are interconnected with metal rods into a molecule-like or spider-web-like, branching sculptural structure that invites one to enter it and get lost in its impressions, or else take a step back, to view it from a detached distance. Like space, time, movements, and impressions all merging together to form an extraordinary whole, it presents a spatialized or temporalized painting that nonetheless eludes the standard perception of space or time. Instead, it is like endless movement on the spot or time looped in on itself.