When you tread through the white
(Miroslav Masin “Fish – Bird – Woman”, CIC, November 2007)
#2 “Everything the poet touches and what renders the material for his poem must pass through him transformed. And vise versa. If the motif is fish – it must, on some curve, pass briskly through the being of the fish”. This is how the poet Eftim Kletnikov views his artistic experience. But the same view on the necessity of a subjective-personal metamorphosis, maybe even more, refers to the artistic venture of the painter who, due to his queer / slanted perception over and over again conquers the world of phenomena with the form of his work, turning it into a world of essences.
#3 In the actual artistic poetics of Miroslav Masin there is an undisputable and obvious procedure of stylization – of reducing the corporeal representations/forms to fundamental marks: beak, eye, rear, foot, followed by their free hybridization: an unexpected coupling to the level of intertwining and/or melting together of different bodies, animal kinds and species. Subjected to the process of painful transformation, the forms given as such in nature, the colors, the bounds – in a stylized way become mutually congruent, that is, torn out of the non-being into a being as new, this time hybrid creatures, in their positive, affirmative, proven and once and for all conquered existence on the painting canvas.
#4 “The animal is an incarnated presence” – states Arthur Schopenhauer – the animal is bound to the visible and the present, and unlike the man, it is “content with the bare existence”.
#5 All these, only conditionally considered, artistic “animals” in the latest artworks of Miroslav Masin seem to testify the act of bare joy which proceeds from the penetratingly applied paint on the canvas, from the bare (uncensored) pressure of the hand on the paint tube or simply from the “digital’ approach – i.e. the direct painting, with a bare finger (instead of the mediator – the brush).
#6 From the initial, white zero on the canvass all the way to the easily written white signature – we feel the stylographic effect of the eloquent, plastic Whiteness, the artistically controlled ecstasy, the undoubtedly tactile (ejaculate) dispersion of the whiteness, the longing for simplicity, so difficult to reach.
#7 The white signature has a stylographic effect, too – and a rich associative space, especially for the chosen ones, for those who not only recognize but also gradate the value of the irreducibility of the white.
#8 The white, but also the body / the white as a body, the body as white. Or rather, a paradoxical (and hybrid, as is the case with Masin) all-existence that in its radical, but not less subtle and seductive (multi-corporeal) forms, horrifyingly approaches the (superior) non-existence!