The important stylistic-formal leap in Trashart – Branko Mrkušić

In the Small Gallery of the Poreč Open University, Eugen Varzić exhibited about ten three-dimensional illustrations, sculptures, frizzes, and reliefs collectively named Trashart (art of trash). Before a large number of interested viewers, the exhibition was enthusiastically opened at the beginning of the week by Gorka Ostojić Cvajner. For this presentation of the strongly experienced art brut-like visual identity of this unknown Varzić, Steinberg’s quote truly describes it descriptively; “Nothing is as appealing as becoming a widower of oneself as quickly as possible.”

Namely, the subtle and meticulous painter of almost Renaissance echoes of red and golden velvety shades with selected traces of relief applications suddenly takes on discarded plastic bottles of everyday consumption that overwhelmed his atelier this summer. He transforms them through gluing and painting into objects of sculptural forms, ingeniously organizing a scenic spatial and luminous plasticity. These creations radiate a pleasing visual subjectivity and a newly imposed identity very acceptable within the corpus of effective coherence.

Varzić enriches the pluralistic stage of the art scene, showing with dedication and resourcefulness the flip side of banal artifacts that realistically reach the value of high criteria, far from the ugly rawness of everyday consumer materials. The exhibits escape one-dimensional classification and, when rounded, possess codes that can be deciphered, opened vehemently and impressively towards the new and the astonishing. Imaginatively, he reexamines the vulgar burdens of the consumer society, transforming them into codes of intriguing transformations.

His quasi-acts, fences, compositions… persist and exist tenaciously, asserting themselves and artistically satisfying through the ludic play of an entirely unexpected poetics. Although the exhibited path is absolutely an individual contribution of Varzić’s restlessness, movements, explorations, and successful transfigurations. Disassembled and reshaped waste becomes an element of playful establishment of lucid, inventive novelty. Swung, black matte-painted forms playfully and purposefully coexist within lapidary, even minimalist forms. It captivates us because it is theatricalized with the measure and taste of the artist, with balance and a studied synthesis of experiment. This new Varzić is witty and successful. Perhaps he smiles mischievously, but he never dissipates into the tricks of empty mockery or vulgarity.

I admire the concretization of this significant stylistic-formal leap, the dynamism of the transformative power that establishes his characteristic decorativeness, now of a new medium, in a different way. He is absolutely desirable in the nonchalant attitude of a generation that has given up on lofty principles but has not degraded or lost itself in intellectual irony.

In this plasticity, the basic raw material corpus is neither important nor primary, but solely the intervention. From an ugly and dirty duckling emerges a swan-like acceptability of unconventionality through which, in today’s world of grotesque solutions, sophisticated artisanship is elegantly established, worthy of the final challenges of alternation.