Gašper Capuder

Untitled (Still Life)​

2018, acrylic on canvas​, 100 x 150 cm

In his artistic practice, Gašper Capuder uses different artistic styles and media as if they were not a matter of an artist’s personal poetics, but rather a momentary choice, a play of roles that the artist assumes at need, when a given subject matter or motif requires it. In an artistic language that is a quotation of realism (although in reality it is its paradoxically exaggerated form), Capuder paints a series of everyday settings at home and at work: his kitchen, the restaurant kitchen he used to work in, and an office. Although these are places of the artist’s first-hand experience, the latter seems absent from them; the paintings are portraits, still lifes of the banal reality of someone’s living and working environments, but with an acute absence of order in them, and thus of sense. At their center, there is always a lack of some kind, which in such renderings of real places produces an alienation effect that makes us read these paintings as reflections of both alienated labor and the alienated production of a work of art, no longer capable of encompassing an authentic relation with the apparent subject of the painting.