Trash Art – Gorka Ostojić Cvajner

After an excellent, subtle, and witty intervention in space, his Venice in Poreč for last year’s Street Art, after a solo exhibition at the Multimedia Center LUKA in Pula, and after deep, authorial, organizational, and coordination immersion in a very demanding, diverse, and numerous programs, such as pole programs populated by this year’s street festival, it was almost inconceivable to determine the possible artistic path of Eugen Varzić.

We could have been led and seduced, from the perspective of this exhibition, by his previous balanced, serene painting, which patinates time to thematize and problematize the relationships and collisions between the present and the past. With the emotion and lucidity of a attentive observer, a silent chronicler of historical changes, a collector of traces and historical fragments into a new completeness. In a picture marked by the curiosity of a young intellectual, a scene nostalgically remembered and subtly reminding of oblivion. These scenically executed pictures, integrated with shallow or high reliefs, elements of architecture, coats of arms, and monument inscriptions, could have led him into further explorations, problematizing the image as a wall, the image as a contemporary-historical fresco, an authentic and current picture-sculpture. However, the excitement of Street Art, the painter’s complete engagement, or rather a deep dedication to the charm, lucidity, wit, openness, accessibility, quirkiness, urbanity, in short, could not remain without an echo.

And the reason is utterly banal! Namely, the summer heat and thirst resulted in personal consumption and incidental authorial production of personal waste. In large quantities in the form of empty plastic Coca-Cola bottles. Their imposing, transparent, and lightweight form became the structure for sculpture, or rather the primary building element for relief architecture.

The emptiness and transparency of the plastic bottle are negated, solidified, and disfigured by a black matte coating. This creates a departure from the beautiful, visually pleasing object of everyday life. With this act, the author reveals, underscores, and problematizes the ethics and aesthetics of the ugly, unnecessary, redundant, and terrifyingly indestructible. Through a further process of constructive adherence, he uses the basic element of ugliness to create a new structure, sculpture, or relief that, through its new role as an artistic object, resists being chained to a civilizational system of dependence, and an indefensibility of self-production and collective production of waste. Turning waste into art was an exciting challenge for Eugen Varzić. Not as a prophetic foretelling of horror, not as an apotheosis homage to the glorification of the ugly, but merely as an artistic challenge.

Thus, Eugen Varzić’s new puzzle ultimately results in an interesting and intriguing cycle. Whether it is about the massive stacking of bottles that create an imposing sculptural form of organic-abstract poetics, expressive speech. Or whether it is about diagonally linked structures of floor or free-floating sculptures, or when the author creates excellent series – friezes, highly effective reliefs, great for integral wall coverage of space.

The fact that everything radiates art brut-like rawness and roughness is an advantage of this exhibition, which spontaneously and very convincingly expresses the feeling towards the terrifying proportions of pollution in reality. And his stance, both personal and artistic, is conveyed in an unconventional way. With unconventional material. With unconventional procedure, never concealing the all-encompassing banality and coarseness of reality. His authorial deviation, as a contradictio in adjecto, in aesthetics is the art of the ugly. Trash as Art by Eugen Varzić.