Sans titre (cire 22), 1990

Sans titre (cire 22) by Mitja Tušek is, in a way, an early version of a painting series he would later exhibit at documenta 9 in Kassel. The same image was painted over repeatedly, amassing up to 30 translucent layers and in later versions reaching up to 70.

The density of the colour is an effect of this superposition, but also of the flattening of each layer with a hot knife. Hovering between abstraction and figuration, these ghost-like and delicate canvases, in parts made of beeswax, are reminiscent of landscapes that could collapse and turn into something else in the blink of an eye. Tušek’s entire oeuvre can be understood as a tactile exploration of the material components and terms of painting, including its peripheries, and in parallel a wandering through the larger histories of the medium and its conditions.