Painters of uncertainty. Remarks on narrative in contemporary painting

The nine short essays selected for this book are result of several discussions with the painters whose work I followed for a long time and presented in different exhibitions in Europe. These essays also witness the profound change of paradigm in contemporary painting, the slow but probably irreversible move from self-referential, autonomous, formalistic, structuralistic and medium-analytic systems towards a new kind of narrative pictorial orientation based on anthropological experiences, on the artist’s engagement for socio-cultural, ethno-cultural, historical references, which contribute to the process of the vital, empathic re-contextualization of the painterly praxis in the concrete, given, extremely complex continuum of life. A certain feeling of uncertainty, a hidden tendency towards obscurity and improbability, an obsession of intimacy and radical sensuality reveal the profound change of paradigm of painting. The radically re-vitalized, intensified, sometimes picturesque and exotic narrative competence and the strongly emphasized referential character of contemporary painting tend to involve the unlimited, heterogeneous – and actually uncontrollable – complexity of the anthropological realities, without any forced teleological intention, without any selection and simplification, homogenization and reduction. The new narrative painting seems to accumulate, absorb and involve all kinds of references of the most divers socio-cultural, anthropological, historical experiences and mental-historical contexts, and doing so it creates a new kind of provocative, disturbing, subversive and radical eclecticism, not only through shaping new visual-plastic realities but also through creating new referential-relational subject matters for the pictorial praxis.