"There are two spheres in every artist, the one we know from his
exterior and the other, which comes to life and gains strength only through the
act of artistic creation, and which is completely different from the first, and
certainly independent of it," wrote Čoro Škodlar (1902–1996), who, as a
man and an artist, merged the two extremes in his relationship to the
circumstances of his time. He was rebellious and defiant by nature, which in
interwar years brought him close to the communist movement. In the partisan Resistance
Movement, during World War II, he became a key figure in Slovenian partisan
film. He directed a reportage on the Ninth Corps, which Lado Ambrožič Novljan
described as: "In the bag of a war reporter thus found itself a great
treasure and a documentary that promised to be of exceptional value to the
world public." After the war, this treasure disappeared inside the Soviet
Union; the Slovenian General Staff handed it over to the Soviet mission to have
it developed in their studios, where all traces of it were lost. But Škodlar felt
painting was his true calling.
His drawings from the post-war prisons, where he found
himself after he parted with his former comrades, have a special place in his
oeuvre.
As such, they are a significant and shocking
historical document of a complex period in Slovenian and Yugoslavian history,
and more. Through these drawings, the painter directly confronted himself and
in this juxtaposition, he saw everything around him in a metaphysical bareness.
Everything in these jottings is seen as if removed from the world, even parts
of the panorama one glimpses through the window of a prison cell. His prison
still lifes, in their solitude and silence, are almost reminiscent of Giorgio
Morandi. In a physically cramped space, the painter touches on eerie distances
with profound contemplation. This vision of enforced solitude in a place where
time passes infinitely slow, through Škodlar’s subtle draughtsmanship, at times
deconstructs matter itself so that the objects scattered around the prison cell
in diffused light hoover in the distance, which represents the innermost
essence of these objects. In the space that is so enclosed, in the space that
has been deliberately constructed as a space of confinement, things are finally
seen as they are: unreachable. This is pure existentialist bareness.
4 April – 8 May 2024
National
Gallery of Slovenia
Prešernova
24
1000 Ljubljana