...Petar Tuškan (1978, Yugoslavia)
...living and working on Wolphaertstraat since 2014
From the W1555 Buurtkrant of July 2024, by Lobke. Translated by Honey.
These are turbulent times. How are you doing? And what are you up to these days?
Maybe I am sad. How are you? I must say that this current madhouse of the world has had an impact on my élan, especially considering the blatant dehumanisation we are witnessing lately. But I am also glad to see that a lot of people around the globe are refusing to remain ignorant.
What kind of art do you make? And which themes are you concerned with?
I mostly make oil paintings. In my art I intend to reach for what is universal in our world of human experience on an alternative level. It is about perception, consciousness and visual culture. About how experience is being shaped. What it is that seems to be real... What it is that appears to be... What seems being alike... What is brought out and what is conditioned... Without a definite form, I am visualising the impossible and offering a space "in-between'' as an extension of consciousness.
I think that understanding our deepest nature; biological, ontological, and psychological is important and always needed.
I learned that those who tend to dehumanise someone have been dehumanised themselves first, devoid of empathy. In these radicalised times, along with a gloomy vision of the future, when violence is served so directly into our faces, hypocrisy is so transparent, and all that in blatant disregard for life; we are all endangered. The resistance nowadays, as it always has been, is to resiliently stand against dehumanisation. We are (now more than ever) bombarded with disturbing information, and at the same time, we are more able to reach for knowledge, yet to impact so little. That grows feelings of anger and powerlessness, and one must resist becoming numb or insensitive. One must carry on caring. But not to be superficially optimistic or pathetic, not to be just humanitarian, for the sake of one's own comfort, but to seek true solidarity and liberation. And that must begin from within. Anything one may face in his lifetime is already in each of us. We are mirroring each other. So, my art is also a mirror.
You prefer to work with oil paint. How do you decide whether a work is finished, and is that a difficult choice?
It happens at the point that it reaches to the state of perfect imperfectness to my senses.
I work on more pieces at once. It can last for months, and at one point all of them suddenly start to communicate to me in the way I wanted; what I see and feel fits in one place by some logic, it fits in the image of that "impossible" I visualised by dwelling in that state of a flow induced by focused labour.
It's like being in the zone, it's not a trance but definitely an altered state of consciousness. And the ending is the most difficult part of the whole process. Because the choice to stop is not entirely mine, the painting is becoming itself and I have to let it go.
At one point of a flow everything comes into its place but also at the same time new ideas are coming for new works to emerge, it's quite infinite. I think that work is actually never finished, it's just stopped in one moment. It's a frozen frame in that infinity process.
I use oil paint because of that time factor, because of their almost infinite drying time.
You were born and raised in Yugoslavia. For how long have you lived here and (how) does living in the Netherlands influence your work?
Yes, I was born in Yugoslavia, but that country doesn’t exist anymore. It is a part of a recent bloody history I experienced while growing up and studying there. I have lived on Wolphaertstraat since 2014. I had affordable living conditions here and a studio, so I could focus on work and remain productive.
Where do you get your inspiration for your work?
For me, there is no inspiration as an initial condition to create. It is something that comes afterwards; I work and once when I get into the flow, my inspiration comes from the process itself. Persistence is all.
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