Ondrej Jurín

ONDREJ JURÍN was one of the founders of the C+S art collective, and he has been a member for thirty-five years. After two years of study at the Studio of Free Creativity at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, he decided to quit and devote his time to painting as a free creative artist. His work has been exhibited both in Slovakia and abroad.

In the context of the Slovak art scene, his work is truly unique; he simply has no equivalent among his peers. His painterly approach is perhaps more aligned to that of Jean Dubuffet, the founder of the Art Brut movement, but we can also see parallels with the Arte Informale or Tachisme which Michel Tapié defined in his book Un Art Autre (Art of Another Kind): “… these artists express themselves freely and without limitations. They consider paint as a material and apply it to the canvas with expressive strokes. Perfect shapes or aesthetic composition are of little concern. In contrast, Arte Informale painters take pleasure in the disordered, intuitive chaos of their works”. This is a form of creativity which arises from emotion, intuition and the spontaneous gesture – there is no place here for aesthetic harmony or traditional rules of composition.

Ondrej Jurín’s art is an expression of playfulness and existential sensitivity. The exhibition features a trio of paintings: IN THE GARDEN, AFTER THE RAIN, and LABYRINTH. These are works which are both an experience and a mystery for the viewer. They are spontaneous, irrational and freewheeling. Jurín disrupts the aesthetic orthodoxy, creating his own world – a personal mythology that goes far beyond conventional ways of looking at art and reality. Without any hesitation whatsoever, he casts proportion and perspective aside, ignoring traditional understandings of spatial illusion; the only space in his work is the plane of the canvas. His figures appear to emerge from the mists, from the subconscious, from the layers of the paint itself; a process more akin to organic growth or the gradual peeling back of archaeological strata.

His creative process is a symbiosis between intuitive choices and physical contact with the material. He applies the paint with his fingers, moulding it into layers, merging the colours together – a similar effect to that of his figural depictions. He conducts a wordless dialogue with them as he works, as the paint slowly dries. This waiting period is an integral part of the process by which he creates his paintings. He sometimes gives us a glimpse of the world below the surface – scribbled handwriting, scratches or coalescences between figure and material – thereby revealing the philosophy underlying the work. The scenes testify to his warm, direct relationship with nature, and the inner kinship he feels towards the animals and plants. We can see also his faith in the goodness of his fellow man.

The work of Ondrej Jurín is a remarkable expression of the authenticity of an inner world which defies all norms and conventions. His paintings offer no answers but pose a host of questions; and this is the precise source of their power and deeply expressive value.

Edita Vološčuková, project curator