Ljubljana, 5.3.2008 to 22.4.2008




Posthumous exhibition that shows the most characteristic works of each period of the painter's opus.

Curator: Miloš Bašin, Marina Mihelič Satler

Gorazd Satler was born in Ljubljana in 1948. After finishing the Secondary School of Design in Ljubljana, Satler went on to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, graduating under Prof. Maksim Sedej. He worked as a free-lance artist. Until his death in 1993 he lived and worked in Ljubljana.
Gorazd Satler and two other painters of his generation, Nikolaj Beer and Zdenko Huzjan, artists who were all finishing the Ljubljana Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1970s and, moreover, shared similar ideas and attitudes, formed an informal trio that, initially, derived from rather than directly related to the tradition of Slovene intimism with more or less distinct expressionist traits. In the late 1960s (1968) all three artists were as yet insufficiently profiled to merit inclusion in the “circle of young expressive figurative artists.”
Obviously, his association with the two above-mentioned artists did not stop Satler from seeking his own way, from trying to dissociate himself from this intimism by venturing into a certain fantastic, surrealist vision of an anonymous, veiled object reality, in which the original functions of the chosen objects were lost, given up to enigmatic non-function and the undefined space in which they literally floated. Critics perceived, or perhaps better foretold, in this disguising of recognizable physical reality in Satler’s works from that period, a “contemplation of human relations, of the modern man’s alienation, of the restless, reborn searching” (Marjan Tršar in his introduction to the catalogue Demšar, Satler, Mestna galerija Ljubljana, 1976/77). The following decade, the 1980s, in fact saw this take shape in Satler’s expression.
In the 1980s Satler’s artistic awareness was strongly marked by the postmodernist practice of drawing on the past, e.g., with citations and in particular with a return to figurative art, which brought with it the need to find a new creative impulse. This he began to discover in human relations, in places that bring people together and separate them at the same time; his Waiting Room seems to make possible an intermingling of human relations and emotions. In this mood or atmosphere Satler sought a dialogue of proximity and, as it were, found refuge in Arcadian pastoralism, possibly only apparently, since all the scenes are rendered with great vehemence, e.g. The Centaurs and the Lapiths, the Drunken Pan, and the Rape of Europa. These paintings bear witness to a release of great tensions, to excitement, to turning the figure upside down, which would have seemed almost sacrilegious during the period of Romanticism. In this respect, Satler was extremely precise and straightforwardly declarative: the time seemed to be approaching when he would draw the line under the apparent extravagance, looseness, emotional vehemence, and excitement.
Thus the artist next came to a standstill, as it were: before the Abyss, before the Dark Shadows, the latter already incorporating black gashes that came from elsewhere and, little by little, inhabited the entire picture plane, at first diagonally, and then crossing one another. In the distinctly flat projection of Satler’s painting they formed new incisions, to the point of appearing like a nightmare the artist was apparently unable to shake off until his untimely demise.
The primary inspiration for these dark gashes was the artist’s study of birds, of their flight, which he recorded with optical faithfulness; first in his characteristic study sketches in watercolor, especially those made in the Paris studio. Could it be that such flights triggered a certain horror vacui, a darkness and ominousness, which entered, in the artist’s metaphorical language, also human relations, interfering with the pairs of men and women, so typical of Satler’s last paintings, when (on the occasion of his last exhibition at what is now the Bežigrad Gallery 1, in 1992) he took the dark gashes a step further, painting them directly onto the wall by his paintings? Today, more than fifteen years later, we cannot find a valid answer to this question. But it nonetheless remains firmly a part of the context of Satler’s veiled sensibility and of his direct responsiveness to the time in which he matured.

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