The selection of works on show at the Bažato Gallery was created over the span of the past decade and more. It is like a diary that does not record time, at least not in the sense of the linear perception of time, but rather records the feelings this period engendered. Individual works or series of works are the artist's painterly interpretations of his surroundings or inner landscapes, of fascinations and preoccupations. Of fantasies and phantasms. The latest chapters of familial psychodrama, existential inquiries, allusions to role models (e.g. Jean Genet), images of flora and fauna, the associative suggestiveness of objects (paper boats, sewing needles, teapots) spill out onto paper and to a lesser extent onto canvas.
Two series in the exhibition are dedicated to the artist's elderly parents, where the fractured relationships beneath the surface are subdued by what's unfolding in the pond and in the garden. The presence of his mother's image, surrounded by the picturesque garden of the family house beneath the Pohorje Hills is a tribute to her steadfastness and fragility all at once, while the vitality and unruliness of the near, yet distant marsh is a representation of the artist's perception of his father's character and role.
Insects, bees, flies occupy a special place in the artist's oeuvre, as well as the moths present in the exhibition, and can be interpreted through common character traits attributed to them, the fleeting and determinate nature of their lives, and through our experience of them with our various senses (the fluttering of the wings, the hum of the swarms).
Similarly, through associations and ascribed meanings, we may read the representations of objects; the inherent paradox of a paper boat, a sewing needle trapped on a canvas, the flurry of a flock of paper cranes. The selection of works is in one place punctuated by two small scenes of unorthodox sexual practices, and with some degree of shyness they speak of the artist's position in relation to bodily pleasure.
The work of Andrej Brumen Čop is characterised by a search for order within disorder, for peace in the midst of the chaos of life. Disoriented by all the stimuli of his intimate, familial, societal and natural environments, the artist liberates himself from the loss of control, whether perceived or real, through a daily practice of artistic expression, marked by a mastery of material and painterly skill. Like the mandalas on the backs of the envelopes for energy bills and of other quotidian banalities, Andrej Brumen Čop's work is a rebellion against the indifference and brutality of the past decade and more.
Jure Kirbiš
(Excerpt from the exhibition text.)
