Cveto Marsi?

In his work, nature is pure essence. It is a meditation on the primitive, the original, or an ecosystem in which great dichotomies live together: reminiscences and moods, memory and spirit. In this sense, the creative process can be defined as a never-ending performance conveyed to the canvas, in which the handling of the painting material has no limitations. Consequently, the gesture leaves its mark and emotional character on the pictorial paste, which has been moulded and modified by the intense remembrances of each place and by the experiences that transcended the landscape. In his career, several stages can be distinguished. In the mid-nineties of the twentieth century, Marsi? worked on an expressionist vocabulary in his painting, using vivid colours and multidirectional brushstrokes as protagonists. In the early years of this century, subtle figurative forms appeared, in which one could slightly recognize an accumulation of the painting paste, but where the search for uniformity and partition of the canvas prevailed, showing the tension between heaven and earth and between the incorporeal and the physical. At times, one could notice objects buried under surface of the painting material, making reference to symbols of a personal mythology and representing clues that are waiting to be deciphered. Since 2002, the surface of the canvas was filled with paint spots that overlap each other and were applied with the fingers in different directions. Marsi? experimented here with colour ranges, producing titles that made reference to mud, clay, saline water and earth. Gradually, especially in the middle of the first decade of this century, Marsi? introduced spherical spots into the pictorial surface. Later these spots were formed into circular tangles and evolved to nests. The nests represents home and homeland, but also, ultimately, the embryonic bed connected with the earth, with its own blood, with its family, and with life. In the exhibition can be seen eloquent sketches of nest shapes in charcoal function as the supplementary notes of a dearly held idea. A photography and video proyection by Petra Paula Merino document for the IVAM what is such a performative and ephemeral work that is then left to the elements after its completion and brief occupation. “The need for expression has no rational explanation, it is intimate, instinctive.It is a primal impulse that comes from the experience of life, from the inside to the outside.This necessity has a unique, personal and intimate character, although it deals with realities that form the non-personal.”Cveto Marsi?