19/05/2020

Carte blanche Silvo Šarić

Projections

15/05/2020 - 16/06/2020

Silvo Šarić’s Projections exhibition follows up in continuity on the artist’s interest in experimentation with light and projections. The artist explores the projection apparatus, directs interest to its constituent elements and surroundings, including optical devices, the beam of light, lens, shadow, building on the artist’s continuous exploration of abstract definitions of space, surface, emptiness, light. Reduced to abstraction, the meeting point between the light and the wall is manifested as an unobjectified background of pure light. For his analogue projections the artist uses older, almost obsolete image reproduction technical media devices, such as a slide projector; however, he reworks it, manipulates it, or strips it off its original function, using it without slides to treat light and shadow, i.e. the projected form, as central content. That way he re-examines spatial relations, perception or features of technical devices, as well as their role and meaning, and creates ambiences of a specific atmosphere. The projector ray has thus emancipated as an unstable and ephemeral, abstract, almost anthological sign and as a form of pure light; it is the central carrier of meaning.
The exhibition at Apoteka sets in a dialogue gathered artworks – two light installations as spatial renditions of ambience-adaptable projections, and also brings together several works on paper, drawings and collages devises as notes and sketches for visual research, as projection ‘preparations’. Silvo Šarić’s works boast analytical aesthetics, exploratory concepts, minimal interventions, impersonal gestures and seemingly simple executions, through which the artist approaches the visual and spatial issues, and his artistic preoccupations correspond to the context of minimalism and abstraction, conceptual or neoconceptual art, or echoes arte povera.
In the weeks behind us we were faced with global scenes of empty cities, empty public spaces, streets, galleries, art institutions. Emptiness, termination or slowdown of human activities and social interaction have bred new feelings and new forms of subjectivity. The gestures of emptiness at Apoteka are more than mere formal and aesthetic explorations, they are both an articulation of emptiness as a response to the current state and a premonition of a new sensitivity, whereas his artistic disposition translates the observations about the extent to which the lack of human presence has engrained in public spaces and people’s lives.
Carte blanche can be an empty background, a gallery wall or a piece of paper, a place for freedom and experimentation, open to challenges and explorations. – Branka Benčić

Silvo Šarić was born in 1965 in Pula. He graduated in sculpture at the Department of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Education in Rijeka in 1990. From 1991 to 1998, he lived and worked in Rome. ArtsLink Fellowship allowed a study visit to New York and Boston in 1998. Since 1998 he is working at the Croatian Restoration Institute, and from 2008 to 2012 he worked as an external associate at the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka. Member of the HDLU Istria. He has exhibited at numerous group and solo exhibitions in Croatia and abroad (MSU Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, MMSU Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rijeka, MMC Luka Pula; City Galleries Osijek – Waldinger Gallery…)

Organized by Apoteka – Prostor za suvremenu umjetnost / Curated by Branka Benčić / Text Branka Benčić / Apoteka is a project by Branka Benčić and Matija Debeljuh

The exhibition is made possible with support provided by Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia

Open by appointment

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