24-06-2022 – 30-07-2022

Alen Floričić’s latest work follows up on his previous procedures developed in the form of short videos, occupying our subconsciousness with peculiar actions and ungraspable content. In addition to his idiosyncratic avoidance of narrative structure, familiar iconography and trends, the ongoingly significant structural element of his work is the examination of the video medium in relation to the exhibition space; the need for its ‘re-enactment’ results in an overwhelming experience of wholeness, like the video installation Untitled 01/22, displayed in Apoteka.

This current piece features something new – authorial detachment – thus far the only formal constant of his work. Once the only protagonist and performer of obsessive actions calling on the mirror of internal psychological reality, now away from the frame, the author is no longer the driving force of the action. Instead of himself, he presents a landscape dominated by a compositional harmony of classical landscape painting. Defying harmony per se, he intervenes into the picturesque balance of a Mediterranean landscape with post-production steps typical of the electronic imaging aesthetics, which vibrates and pulsates. As a master of atmosphere and minimal action, he adds to the image a background noise of a motor boat which permeates the gallery space, recreating the experience of time as a platform for a constant exchange of contradictory emotions of time flow and a paradoxical ‘running in circles’ that originates on the verge between what we hear and what we see – the sound of a motor boat, from which we assume the scene was filmed, and a static flickering shot. Mobilising the pointless expectation of an event, the author takes us back to one of his previous works (Untitled 03/04), in which he uses a simple binary opposition of action (performance) vs. stasis (inaction) to capture time in an infinite loop. He resolves the insolvable question of what is reality – the static moment or duration – with a moving image. He suggests that the irreconcilability of two time curve extremes is possible and ordinary, and that the only criterion of change is inscribed in the registry of perceptive illusions. If frequent changes make time dense and dotted, and elongate their postponement, what about the motor boat that speeds along the shore and always sees the same sight?

Sabina Salamon

Alen Floricic. Born in 1968 in Pula, Croatia. Graduated Visual Arts at the Faculty of Pedagogy in Rijeka, Croatia. He has completed two-year postgraduate studies of Video and New Media at the Academy of fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Since 1997 he works as Professor at the School for Applied Arts and Design in Pula. From 2008 up to 2013 he has worked as assistant professor at the department of New media at the Academy of Applied Arts and Design in Rijeka, Croatia. He works mainly in the field of instalational video art. He has exhibited at a large number of solo and group exhibitions in Croatia and abroad and has won a number of national visual art awards. He was one of the artists that represented Croatia at the 51. Biennale di Venezia, 2005.