Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
Aleksij Kobal
Academic painter
In Bonjour, Monsieur RGB, the artist presents paintings made from 2024 to the present. Varied in visual language and dense with imagery, this selection of recent works vividly illustrates the organic way in which he moves between cycles of painting. Despite evident differences and deliberate departures, the cycles remain connected, establishing a coherent rhythm of form and meaning. Yet beneath this clear continuity lies a practice of constant enquiry and technical refinement. It allows the appearance, atmosphere and iconography of the works to be continually reconfigured and enriched. In this way, they keep pace with a changing world, which the artist reflects through layers of symbolic content with directness, an uncompromising eye and an unfailing sensitivity. This exhibition brings an increasingly acute paradox of apparent reality to the fore: on one side hovers a doomed world permeated by technology; on the other, we witness the last breaths of nature slipping through humanity’s greedy, bloodstained fingers.
One of the paintings’ most significant elements is the boundless expanse of sky. Floating architecture, Renaissance clouds, rising mountain ranges, the tops of conifers, divine hands and giants looking back: an assemblage of carefully articulated forms inhabits, in one way or another, an unconventional vision of a gridded sphere. On closer inspection, the sky reveals itself as a complex computer matrix. At times vivid red, elsewhere pink, greenish or grey, its vastness gives way to a winding geometric grid, where the deliberate use of digital printing conjures a new virtual world. Printing the chosen matrix directly onto canvas becomes a conscious artistic gesture, a direct statement, almost a manifesto. It is a pointed play on the idea that the canvas—physical, analogue and made of natural materials—is itself composed of pixels. The painted sky evokes a screen and thus approaches the familiar comfort zone of contemporary life, in which gazing at screens in their many forms occupies most of our waking hours. The paintings address, even stoke, the viewer’s habitual dependence on the digital sphere. The artist achieves this not only by transferring a computer matrix whose geometry recalls endless wormholes or unpredictable glitches, but also through a particular palette. The RGB colour model—the combination of red, green and blue that underlies every screen—is painted or printed on canvas with physical pigments. Reality changes medium; painting and the digital intertwine. One might even speak of a deliberate embrace of digital logic: our repeated consumption of countless luminous pixels is subversively carried over to the painted canvas, a medium freighted with art-historical associations and governed by a different conception of the colour wheel. An ironic question emerges about the existence of an unmediated reality and the sense—or senselessness—of illusions we have made our own.
Across this gridded ground, which draws the viewer into a seductive illusion, numerous figurative elements are rendered in a more traditional painterly manner. Realistic, billowing clouds and organic, lifelike trees appear almost as chance deviations, creating an unexpected tension between two realities. In underscoring the disquieting ambiguity of what is real, the artist seems neither to admonish nor to moralise deliberately; he simply lays bare the condition in which we find ourselves. Floating clouds, trees, mountains and old palaces bring something recognisable and familiar to the paintings: a classical pictorial world of painterly forms. Yet the artist plays with the thought that what feels closer to contemporary humanity is still the digital—that which operates as apparition, simulation, matrix or illusion.
For human reality, and the way we understand it, now take shape through the digital sphere. The physical environment and nature are real; so too is the virtual world in which we actually live. And both are going to hell.
The exhibited works bear titles such as The Sky over Gaza, Pentagon, The Great Wall of China, The Tower of Babel and Birth of the Colossus. The titles alone point to the crisis of the present world and to a zeitgeist marked by paralysing anxiety, mounting fear and utter uncertainty. Much of their imagery directly concerns war and notions of defence, security, surveillance and violence. The façades of Mladika, a local building now housing important government ministries, are, for instance, set against one another to form a pentagon. Painted silhouettes of refugees hurrying past the floating complex expose the image of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs beneath its Pentagon disguise. Equally imposing is a menacing giant who turns to look back as he rises above the clouds. His hand gesture and entire bearing allude to The Colossus, associated with the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya. That earlier work was painted during the Peninsular War. The giant’s aggression, darkness and monumentality symbolise power, domination, war and death. Blinded, his head in the clouds and full of contempt, he evokes history’s renewed repetition and the horrors of warfare amplified by today’s technologies. Seen in this light, the works in the exhibition become cautionary metaphors that are coming true before our eyes. The two most recent paintings even include the image of a colossal, perhaps divine hand, extending from an indeterminate sky and intervening decisively in a three-dimensional geometric—and, crucially, digital—form. Beneath the hand lies a hopscotch grid: a simple traditional children’s game that recalls a carefree childhood while also suggesting different ideas of dreams and the play of the unconscious. Despite their subject matter, the works retain a welcome sense of magic and timelessness. On the contrary, these qualities emerge as a quiet consolation in the subtleties of their visual language, their technical experimentation, their choice of motifs and their sequence within the exhibition. The exhibition’s title itself refers to a central figure of nineteenth-century Realism, wittily invoking the recurring doubt as to whether reality can be represented and the continuing dialogue with art-historical tradition. Bonjour, Monsieur RGB reminds us: an artist may be romantic, but the world is anything but.
