It was Paul Gauguin at the School of Pont-Aven in the late 19th Century, who agitated against an art that was, ‘round the eye and not in the mysterious centre of thought’. Gauguin subsequently became one of the motivations for the European Symbolist movement. Symbolism maintained the necessity of painting to move beyond resemblances of the real world, to the ideist (or idea) where the vision, the imagination, memory and independent causal connections are signified. The nature of symbolism inevitably resulted in an art that had an intense individualism. Consistent with this, the current artist in residence at Mildura’s, The Art Vault, Marko Jakše is like a latter day symbolist.

Born in Ljubljana in Slovenia, Jakše paints highly idiosyncratic figurative works that draw upon a romantic fantasy world inspired by Slovene mythology. The Jakše world is inhabited by humans and animals, (and often hybrids of the two) that are isolated and alienated in fictitious spaces that are neither inside or outside, natural or artificial. The spaces warp backwards and forwards from what appears at times to be deep Renaissance illusionistic space to the flat illogical space of Surrealism.

There is an implied violence in the iconography, which seems to be intentionally provocative. The painting’s pervade a morbid and melancholic obsession with the visceral and carnal aspects of the human condition.

In discussing this, Jakše refutes a logical or reasoned explanation for this imagery. However, one is drawn to speculate on how much of the collective burden of Balkan history and politics, from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, German occupation, to the recent dissolution of Yugoslavia into separate states, has seeped into the subversive unconscious of Jakše.

When Aleksandra Kostić wrote that Jakše, "uses realism as a means to deceive or alternatively convince the eye", l’m not sure whether this provides the complete understanding. Jakše, in a more revealing way refers to his search for the un-seen image. The image or juxtaposition that doesn’t exist, that lays outside the intellectual, pictorial and theoretical frameworks that condition the contemporary artist. A serious ambition indeed.

Although Jakše is very aware of contemporary European painting traditions, and despite its obvious references to the surrealism, his work and doctrines seem more akin to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement in England in 1848. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to dispense with conventions, to embrace the notion of freedom, and to emphasis the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and methods of depiction. Jakše certainly embraces this ambition.

—Neil Fettling, Senior Lecturer, School of Visual Art and Design, La Trobe University, Mildura campus