Photo: Uroš Potočnik
Photo: Uroš Potočnik
Wednesday, 20 August 2025, 7pm – 9pm
P74 Gallery
>You are cordially invited to attend the opening of the exhibition by Uroš Potočnik on Wednesday, 20 August 2025, between 7pm and 9pm at the P74 Gallery in Ljubljana.
With this exclusive one-day event, we are ending the summer break at the gallery and opening the fall exhibition season of the Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E.
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We are looking at representations of castle vedutas – ruins resonating against a decorative background. They are trying to materialise into a three-dimensional form through the illusionistic spatial deformation of the canvas, but unfortunately fail to do so. History remains two-dimensional, frozen, and immersed in the lighting events between the painting’s centre and periphery. By this, I wish to allude to a sleeping, forgotten history that is constantly manipulated, deformed, and subjected to reinterpretation for the needs of domestic consumption and large financial forces of the silent background. History has become a decor turned into an aesthetic ornament for the needs of politics, finance, and fake philanthropy.
The paintings that show male figures practising mixed martial arts, placed in an interior of supernatural light, represent controlled violence. The material and painted texture that extends across the surface of the paintings suggests touch, or rather, encourages the viewer to touch it. The texture supports the touch present in the act of practising martial arts. I wonder if the continuous, successive wars that are raging around the world are not actually the result of controlled violence, driven by powerful but silent financial backgrounds.
However, controlled violence can at some point cease to be mere puppet and can simply get out of control, thus turning the world into barbarism in which all the norms and standards that we have accepted after the Second World War will shatter to pieces.