The display design follows the logic of condensing and arranging works in clusters so that viewers can trace the visual narratives that evolve from large numbers of works being juxtaposed, and come to know and be drawn into the artist’s characteristic visual language. Evolving over a period of more than thirty years, Erič’s visual language is easily recognizable, distinct and strong, marked by his typical, critical irony and satire softened with optimism, humour, and joy. It is based on drawing (in pencil, charcoal, ink, pastel, or – especially in works on canvas – acrylic) with a clear-cut line, with the sequences of images always preserving the feeling of an apparently simple, straightforward, and logical visual language. The logic of Erič’s works lies in their special inner and outer structure, which consistently remains flexible, variable, and open to a combinatory interplay of the image parts or components. The artist has created his own rules for organizing the totality of his images, founded on the semantic and structural looseness of the pictorial elements or motifs, which are freely moved around in the images taken as a whole. In composition, the artist uses a grid system; as the motifs follow one another, he accentuates them with vertical, horizontal, and diagonal emphases. Condensing the motifs in the centre or along the edges also systematically builds the visual narrative, full of allusions to change or partial repetitions of individual elements within the whole. Erič’s images are open, flexible, structurally mobile forms. In a wide variety of motifs and subjects the artist undermines social norms in visual expression and gradually takes images in the direction of motion, playing with strings of motifs that together form a whole arranged over a large expanse. His works seem as though they could be constructed on and on, continued, altered, extended into oversized forms, perhaps expanding beyond the space of the exhibition venue. In Erič’s work we often see a dynamic, changing relation between the structural and the semantic organization of images; a work absorbs and reconstructs the painter’s vision of the world around him through the narrative combinations and the visually created balance of motifs determined by his search for the original image. He discovers this originality in the visual language itself (the drawing), in its structure (the grid system), and the elements of content/subject, with which he shows reality as he sees it in a relaxed and lively manner. The emphases of the subject or the content derive their strength of narrative and visual expression also from such elements as expressive visual accents, allegorical and symbolical emphases, comedy, laughter, humour, irony, parody, farce, grotesque, sarcasm, and carnival. Through variously dense, sometimes minimal arrangements and through systems of repetition or alteration, the images produce a maximum of narration and intense visual effects.

Milan Erič: Non Overview Exhibition

Painter Milan Erič’s retrospective exhibition at the City Art Gallery Ljubljana is the most extensive overview of his artistic output to date. It is conceived as a visually dynamic display ...