Ceysson & Bénétière

Life on Mars

In the exhibition entitled Life on Mars, Swiss artist Mitja Tušek captures the ambiguity of "living things" through pictorial creations that waver between representation and abstraction, protocol and chance.

First the large paintings from the Cercles series started in 2015 evoke the genre of portrait. Cercles 2018 consists of more group portraits. Each dislocated figure is a combinatory variation of nine black disks of various diameters arranged on a pale background that appears both unified and shifting since it is made of prismatic pigments that reflect the whole chromatic spectrum based on light orientation. The circular geometric punctuations hold a symbolic meaning: they represent the nine orbs of Dante's inferno as well as lighter sign-images -grotesque variations around Mickey Mouse. The blinding smudges also evoke the abstract face machine conceptualized by Deleuze: "white wall- black hole(s)".

Then, female nudes deceive their very academism through forms that emancipate and break free from their design and toward shapeless chaos. "To remember that a painting, writes Maurice Denis at the end of the 19th century, before being [...] a female nude [...] is essentially a plane surface covered with colors assembled in a definite order." Here, each acrylic canvas is precisely the result of a concretion of successive layers of pictorial matter residues. Based on the same creative process, each layer of glossy paint thinly laid on one canvas is immediately transferred onto a second one while still fresh in order to obtain a replica, a print of the ephemeral matrix. Each canvas is therefore laminated with an accumulation of about sixty printed transfers. These thin pictorial layers give live to female figures distorted by the materiality of their pictorial flesh. They dissolve in reversed symmetry and the strangeness of a non-iconic resemblance, a "contact resemblance." Reversibility and dissimilarity are at the very core of printing. With Femmes nues, 2004-2011, matrix and print merge. Which one is the other side? These painting transfers cast some doubt.

The Peintures texte series, 2009-2018, exacerbates this symmetrical reversibility through playing the process of the famous Rorschach tests again. But beyond the visibility of these imaginary projection surfaces and the perception of their sensitive materiality, one can simultaneously read vertical words lying under the pictorial signifier. Like a both visual and textual chiasm, the faces of a same coin echo one another: "Pride/Shame". But also "What should we do?" This quote borrowed from Lenine and Mario Merz (in his work Che Fare, 1969), expresses a both existential and political questioning while reflecting the viewers' unsteadiness, their hesitation between what they would like to see and what they are able to conceive. Aren't all visible things wrapped up in an invisible coat? "You only have to look around you to see life on Mars", says Mitja Tušek with seriousness and humor.

Anne Favier

Ceci/Cela

The show, Mitja Tušek's fourth with the gallery, will offer a first glimpse into a new series entitled 'Circle Paintings', in which black circles (always nine of them) of varying size floating on a background of interference paint sometimes fuse into one another and always suggest, in their combination, a figure that never quite materializes. Those familiar with Tušek's work will immediately recognize formal similarities and shared concerns between the works in this new series and in the 'Text Paintings'. In the latter, the artist folds the canvas over to create a mirroring effect, and the mirrored word produces a Rorschach stain that wavers somewhere between the legible, the purely abstract and the strangely figurative, though, here too, we can never quite settle on what figure they adumbrate.

Both series use interference paint, which varies in colour and shading in relation to our position and to the light, and lends movement to the work. The attention to movement and the attempts to bring it into painting without falling into the gimmicky has been a running thread of Tušek's work. He first drew the attention of the art world with his wax paintings, shown at Documenta IX. Some of these are figurative, but the layer upon layer of pigment and wax lend to a ghostly quality to the figurative elements, which, under certain conditions, seem almost to disappear. Others are first experienced as impenetrably shallow monochromes reflecting nothing other than our own shadow; but then, suddenly, a change of light or viewing position can open up a deep well, as if the inscrutable mirror had dissolved to reveal its liquid depth, or forms we could not have imagined there but a second before, or simply the traces of the waxing knife. In an earlier series, the artist uses lead for his support, thus essentially exposing the compositional elements and colours to the oxidation the medium is susceptible to: over time the colours lose their lustre and the forms merge into the support, surviving as little more than a memory.

A distinguishing, and admirable, quality in the work of this Swiss/Slovenian painter living in Brussels is that it raises these questions without ever seeming pedantic or moralizing. Tušek's work is a rare thing these days: if it can be incredibly self-aware without dissolving into naval gazing and reducing its context to a set of easy truisms, it is precisely because its self-awareness is born from an eye - playful, sardonic, tongue-in-cheek - aware of the gaze of the other and always attuned the mysteries just beyond the frame.

Emiliano Battista

The evanescent landscapes Tušek painted in the late 1980s followed the genre’s basic law: a horizon which separates the Earth from the sky. However, the sky was so elongated that it was certain to disappear over time. In the paintings he executed from 2006 to 2016, called Forêts [forests], the space has no landmark; the gaze fades into a dense jumble of green and blue hues, sometimes brown, whose matter shows regular threads from place to place.

Tušek uses an application painting process; this time he does not apply a canvas to another canvas but he uses bubble wrap impregnated with paint and places it on the canvas. In this way—with one movement, the plastic lays down, rejects and sucks up the paint—depth appears out of the surface and the eyes get lost in successive accidents which eventually form a consistent set. The appearance of a figurative meaning is uncertain once again but extremely effective: we are not confronted with the complete picture of a landscape but our eyes can make up a landscape from a kind of cell formation. As everyone knows, a landscape only exists for those who are detached enough to consider it as such. Regarding a woodland scene, it becomes real for those who get lost in it, taking an imaginary walk and adopting an actual look despite the confusion.

Mitja Tušek’s forests can be understood as prior to any civilization, with no path crossing them, with no clearing from which the sky could be observed.

A world per se before the civilizing undertaking subjugated it and created a “nature” which cannot be designated as such anymore. According to Robert Harrison, “without such outside domains” that forests constitute, where “the outlaws, the heroes, the wanderers, the lovers, the saints, the persecuted, the outcasts, the bewildered, the ecstatic […] have sought out asylum […], there is no inside in which to dwell.”

Tušek’s undergrowths belong to a domain totally uninvolved with human ambitions. His forests spread out like a relatively unknown area where the artist can actually practice his senses again, as an outlaw who forces the eye to recognize a vanishing point.

These Forêts do not refer to a model. They were painted in the same abrupt style and with the same confidence in a reality that is completely fabricated by the eye

Alain Cueff, excerpt from the text The line of painting, 2018