stane klančnik

STANE KLANČNIK

Stane Klančnik is a truly unique creative personality who has spent the last four decades in confident exploration of various creative fields, moving effortlessly between music, poetry and the visual arts. His creations unveil the artist’s intimate communication, speaking of his inner world captured on the white medium. The intimate nature of his creations is the reason his creations often remain hidden from the world in the artist’s studio. The wider public had the first opportunity to catch a glimpse of his work in the spring of 2010 in the MIK Gallery in Ljubljana.
The present exhibition is another rare opportunity for the visitor to experience the artist’s genuine, freshly unique expression and rejoice in his independence from trends and commonly held ideas. This is an exhibition that celebrates the artist’s own perspective and idiosyncrasies and discloses his individual reality, his veritas. Therein lies the utmost value of his work; in the words of Wassily Kandinsky, true art draws its power and existence from its creator. When we observe works by Stane Klančnik, we are looking at more than just images, much more than drawings in ink, the artist’s pigment of choice. We are in fact looking at an essential part of him.
To enter the world of visual expression means to experience true freedom to Stane Klančnik. To him, this is primarily a special ritual that also happens to produce works of visual art. One may consider his creations to be psychograms, visual manifestations of his inner impulses. They are his means of travelling back into his true self and we cannot help but feel they are a manifestation of his personal catharsis.
This artist sees the line as the original, primary mode of visual expression and his creative guideline. It is his means of direct, uncensored expression, being an intimist painter, a sensitive creative personality who bares himself on the canvas, standing almost naked before us in his most intimate visions, thoughts, sensations and emotions.
Never fearing to be different, the artist refuses to bow down to the cold formality of transferring visual reality to the artistic medium. Quite the opposite, he runs from it over and over again. He creates paintings that are utterly free of any trace of illustration. He is in fact deliberately trying to create the so called ugly art, or better said, he is striving to break free from the commonly accepted criteria, the agreed norms and rules of visual art. Despites the fact that his drawings do not tell stories, the viewer can recognise numerous associative allusions to the world we see around us. The artist’s creative freedom extends to the observer and manifests itself as the freedom of seeing and perceiving. Therefore the title does not tell you the story or sum up the essence, nor does it reveal the message. The title will not paint the picture for you. It is the author’s mode of communication with another sphere of his expression – poetry.
The story telling dimension is instead replaced by a visual wealth, with lines of countless characters travelling from hardness to softness and back again, with wide and narrow swaths transitioning from thin to thick, from flowing to staggering; sometimes straight and sometimes curved, switching between taut and lax and hard and soft, characterised by traces of various structures and textures. The lines seem to exist in the air above the medium, floating there while performing their choreography as if directed from the above, in their dynamic yet relaxed and fresh interplay, while at the same time possessing a quality of steadfastness and determination, not unlike calligraphic echoes of enigmatic messages.
These lines are the carrier of the activity captured in the painting, they are both the essence and the message played out on the canvas stage; a performance with a powerful message, much like poetry caught in the stroke of a master calligrapher, yet firm and precise.
The visual expression of Stane Klančnik is created with ink and innovative brushes from unusual materials that lend a distinctive character to his creations. He chose black ink for technological reasons; its trace is not transparent and provides substance and finesse to allow the artist to play with it, navigating, scratching and shaping it in innovative ways, thus widening the expressive spectrum of the black contour and introducing modification and variation to the creative process itself. The black outline draws its added power of expression from its dialogue with the white medium and the abstract articulation of the grey forms that seem to have been called into existence by the pure, uninhibited creative energy. The colour black also possesses a special magic; this “invisible colour” brings unseen things before our eyes where they can begin revealing both their general and personal repertoire of symbolic meanings.
By style and form alone we could consider these direct, full blooded drawings to be works of gestural expressionism, abundant with a thriving and energetically dominating scripture of lines. But when we consider their creative aspect and the artist himself in this complex perception it becomes readily apparent that one could hardly hope to draw an accurate comparison with any of the wider, general trends in art.
His paintings are a gestural representation of conscious and unconscious states transformed into visual expression, much like an open door into the artist’s own private psychological sphere. Or in the words of Stane Klančnik himself, they are both “psychokinetic manuscripts” and works of “raw graphic intimism”.

Anamarija Stibilj Šajn