JANEZ JANŠA

POLITICS OF PAINTING
2007
Series of 13 paintings, acrylic on canvas, dimensions variable

Contemporary art has become a hatching ground for more or less genuine projects that bring forward images of violence and inequality, suffering, war and pain. The image of the political is, however, not political merely because of its motif. With the project Politics of Painting Janez Janša reveals the other part of the political in art, one that does not exist in the motif, but in the very structure of the painting.
With the intention to make a series of paintings the artist selected thirteen word combinations that evoke politically marked events within the 20th century history. He handed over these word combinations to a designer, who chose the font, size and colour of the text as well as the background colour and dimensions for each painting. The colours were chosen from the selection of Liquitex acrylic colours and the format of the canvass from the three different versions offered to him by the artist. By transferring the creative process onto the other - and here it is important to note that the other is a graphic designer who, in contrast to a painter, openly participates in the market economy process - Janša dismissed the idea of the artist/author. Opting for such a division of labour which makes the artist an executor of the designer’s instructions, Janša undermined also one of the key elements for evaluating the painting which is - according to the modernist construction of the politics of painting, formed through the creativity of the artist, and which was here defined by the designer.
The artist had thus received exact designer’s instructions for creating the paintings. Janša intervened into the given layout with adding to it his painterly gesture and his signature. The series that emerged was a result of two different approaches to creating the visual. The graphic designer and the painter approached the creation from two different structural ways of constructing an image and these two views merged in the project Politics of the painting.
The paintings are exhibited in the order following the chronological order of the political events in history. The paintings of Janez Janša pose questions regarding the politics of painting. Are the politics linked to what is in the picture or with the manner in which the painting has emerged and maintained its own politics as an object with specific characteristics and their consequential ideology?

(excerpt from the text by Petja Grafenauer Krnc, published in: Painting Project, Galerija Ganes Pratt, Ljubljana, 2007, translation by Sunčan P. Stone)

JANEZ JANŠA (1973, Ljubljana, SI) is based in Ljubljana. He represents the younger generation of artists, who problematise the field of painting through the use of media image and a free relationship with various technological processes. I would not say that his main interest is in expanding the field of painting; he is interested more in the ideology of painting itself (…) The most radical presentation of his work took place at the 2003 Venice Biennial, when he hung his paintings in the homes of their temporary owners. The paintings had built-in cameras that transmitted images to the gallery in real time. These paintings belonged to the series Terror=decor, which examined how both media and artistic imagery, especially modern imagery, changed into décor in the service of capitalism. (excerpt from a text by Zdenka Badovinac)