Marjan Gumilar: Focusing

What does the Marjan Gumilar exhibition at the Kostanjevica church show and tell us?

Stations of the Cross in painting. The process of how a painting goes through phases of suffering, cutting and torture, so that only through extreme reduction, on the verge of abstraction, does it achieve a sublimity that is a match for the times, that climbs upon the altar and goes beyond.

In order to reduce the painting to its fundamental components, Gumilar does not need to cut it or multiply it, for indeed its Stations of the Cross are evident within the painting. Then the process that can already be perceived within the individual painting is then externalised into the space and divided into individual sequences. At the moment when you put together (more than) two paintings, when you initiate (at least) two cuts, you are not faced simply with the issue of the spatial neighbourhood (left, right) and temporal sequence (before, after), but primarily and firstly with the issue of beyond: physics is hollowed out by metaphysics, the world can find in itself the cut to the sacred.
On the empty altar of the Kostanjevica monastery church, Marjan Gumilar’s paintings are reduced to their fundamental components: black, white, brush stroke, plane, light, glint – and our view. The church is turned on its head here, since in the holiest place of its rituals it does not place god-the artist, but the believer-viewer.

Photo: Damjan Švarc