Zoran Mušič, Impressions of Light

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Slovenian artist Zoran Mušič focussing on two series in the artist’s oeuvre: landscapes and cathedrals. Both series reflect his lifelong engagement with themes of isolation, spirituality, and silence. Mušič made impressions of landscapes—particularly Byzantine, Dalmatian, and Italian geographies—obsessively painted with slightly different hues and perspectives. They were essentially poetic reflections of colour and light. In the 1980s, he turned to studying the interior of cathedrals—examining the magical shimmering of light and dark, which amplifies the mystical sense of introspection and profound isolation.

Mušič spent his childhood in the rural environment of the Dalmatian coast and the Karst Mountains, a harsh Mediterranean land, stretching out over rocks and hills, formed from the dissolution of soluble rocks such as limestone, dolomite, and gypsum. Mušič's landscapes are an essential part of his body of work, deeply influenced by the arid, barren regions of his youth. His landscapes depict sparse, desolate scenes with muted tones, reflecting both the physical and emotional barrenness of these places. These works are characterised by their minimalism, with broad, sweeping vistas that evoke a sense of solitude, silence, and timelessness. Mušič said, “The bare landscape, the Karst, is the matrix of all my paintings,” as if he wanted to internalise the desert, the harsh, desolate, arid, and thirsty lands. His rocky landscapes bear an eternal silence, a silence that Mušič preferred over the human voice. As Marcel Proust said, “True books must be the children not of broad daylight and conversation, but of darkness and silence”.

Following the horrific experiences Mušič had while imprisoned in the concentration camp of Dachau, he turned to the imagery of his childhood, to its poetic purity of memory. In the early years after his detention, he painted these landscapes blended with allusions to peasants and the trotting of obedient small horses and donkeys. In the late 1950s and '60s, landscapes reemerged as the main theme of his paintings, devoid of human or animal figurations. In the “terre dalmate” (Dalmatian lands), sometimes called “Ombre sul Carso” (Shadows on the Karst) he painted ecstatically stunned landscapes, with prominent dark shadow lines and dots that stand out from the fairy background. They were described as visions of another world that stand as a reply to the tragic experience of death.

In the mid-1960s he painted “motivo italiano” in which he used vivid colours, such as Umbrian earth, mauves, ochres, blues, greens, and pinks. The extremely delicate brushstrokes bear an unusually light, rhythmic quality. In an interview, the artist commented: “I think the work is like a butterfly, a breath, a nothing. For a painter, the hand is not an instrument: when he paints, he must not even feel it.”

In the 1970s, Mušič travelled throughout Italy, often by train, and painted his series “paesaggio Italiano” (Italian landscapes) as well as his “paesaggio roccioso” (Rocky landscapes) focussing on isolated, barren rocky landscapes, each with a slightly different colour scheme—sometimes with vivid orange evening light, sometimes in somber, grey morning light, sometimes in a dramatic chiaroscuro. The tonal subtlety of subdued colours and the use of the empty canvas emphasises space and emptiness and enhances the quiet, meditative feeling of the works.

Between 1983 and 1985, Mušič painted about twenty variations on the theme of “Interno di cattedrale”—interiors of Venetian cathedrals. The recurring theme concerns an obsession with light and shadows. One could easily compare them to the work of Claude Monet who painted the cathedral of Rouen repeatedly, each time capturing an impression of the moment. Each canvas captures the cathedral at a different time of day and various weather conditions, tracking the shifting light across the stones of the medieval structure, demonstrating the wide variety of colour and tones. However, in contrast to Monet, Mušič wasn’t interested in the architectural facades, but in the interiors of the Venetian cathedrals, how the light pours through a window high in the accentuated arch and how it transformed the architecture into a sacred place. The interior reveals a darker, more mysterious and profound mysticism.

Mušič produced his first Venetian cathedral interiors during World War II when he was influenced by the watercolours of his teacher Ljubo Babić and a contemporary painter from Zagreb’s academy Emanuel Vidović He revisited this motif in the 1980s, when he turned them into even more obvious etudes in illumination, both from the sense of composition and chosen colour scheme. Delicate colours of muted browns, matte whites, transparent ochres, faded pinks, faded blues, and burnished golds seems to come out of the darkness of shadows. . “Since 1943, in Venice, I was fascinated by the interior of St. Mark's. I tried to make some sketches. Recently, I have taken up the theme again, trying to convey the deep silence, the atmosphere of the cathedrals, their grandiose aspect. From the almost total darkness that surrounds us when we enter them, vaguely illuminated forms begin to be perceived.”[1]

Cathedral interiors had long been an interesting motif for him due to their grand amounts of space, their mystical darkness, and the profundity of their silence, which characterises his entire oeuvre. Like in his landscape paintings, The dark, atmospheric settings of these religious spaces, devoid of human figures, evoke a sense of solitude and sacred contemplation. The interplay of light and dark, also visible in the small formats on paper, resonates with his broader artistic exploration of human suffering and resilience.

Both in the series of landscapes and cathedrals, Zoran Mušič distils his works of art to their essential forms and atmospheres, conveying the powerful, timeless beauty and desolation of nature through texture, abstraction, and a muted colour scheme.

[1] Zoran Mušič quoted in Zoran Mušič de Dachau a Venecia (p. 150), exh. cat. 2008 exhibition curated by Jean Clair, Fundació Caixa Catalunya, Barcelona.