FIGURE AS AN EVOLUTIONAL AND GENDERLESS OBJECT

In the sculpture of Rok Bogataj, the figure is the focal point around which most of his artistic explorations revolve. To him, the multitude of possibilities for positioning the figure represents a creative dilemma. He openly and almost vehemently appropriates the figure in his work; adopts it and grows fond of it. As he seeks new images and contexts for it, the figure's historical dependence is peculiarly reflected in his creative process. Which is hardly odd at all since, given the number of its rises and falls, the evolution of the figure's continuous manifestation in the world of art nowadays seems nearly conspiratorial both in an aesthetic and social context. With its mimetic image and associated symbolic connotations the figure has always represented either an obstacle/boundary or a challenge/open creative field. Bogataj's work incorporates a symbiotic origin of this remarkable range of potential old and new 'faces' of the figure. His figure tries to be an organ, an abstract form - soft, erotic, fertile, ancient, such as for example his early bulbous Venuses made of lime plaster. But it can also be quite the opposite - hard, cool, calculating, impersonal and entirely genderless, like his rationalist robotic constructions; puzzles of wooden sticks and brightly coloured artificial adhesive tape. There is a constant undulating contrast between the abstract and concrete, sensual and rational - which is precisely what happened to the figure in the history of art and what we can, after all, experience in today's real world. In his work, there is a continuous interplay between the human intellect and human impulsiveness, one engulfed in the other and vice versa. But this time, the sculptor takes his new, life-size figures, which he sets in a natural environment, a step further. Despite their flat shape and apparent rigidity, which render them similar to robots or even apparitions which have just emerged from a virtual, digital world, nature restores their lost lives to them. But this is as far as Bogataj is prepared to venture, as he seeks to close them off from any social, ideological or other contexts, and preserve their lack of gender. While the Venuses were still women, some of Bogataj's figures were indeterminate and hermaphroditic even before that, like these latest genderless creatures. He has managed to free these figures from the stereotypical figurative symbolism that might otherwise overburden them and their associated denotations. In this way, the artist's sculptures remain in a kind of kinetic and indeterminate duality -one foot in the future and the other in the past; in the field of the abstract and in the field of the concrete. While Slovene sculpture after the 1980s saw a radical post-minimalist continuation of rationalistic and analytical expression, and at the same time a radical deviation toward the sensual, the gestural, the image and the figure, these two phenomena are generated as a plausible creative compromise in the work of contemporary younger generation sculptors such as Bogataj. With their cool, silhouetted abstractedness and unequivocal expressiveness, Bogataj's most recent sculptures pull the figure from the expected reality, rationalise it and free it from the danger of exaggerated mimesis, including materiality, but at the same time return it to nature, which originally 'created' it. This duality frees the figure from various connotations and stereotypical symbolism, and presents it as a minimised and indefinite sign, while setting it back into life and on a more human scale.

Barbara Strle Vurnik