Video paintings

Two progressive artists, in exhibit opening at Carmel's Winfield Gallery, make contemporary art for the contemporary canvas

By LISA CRAWFORD WATSON

Herald Correspondent

Fog, by its very nature, is mysterious.

Blowing in through the trees or settled in upon the shore and shrouding all distinction, it hangs like a sheet tossed over a cage and evokes silence.

A car, parked along the curb, the beach, the roadway, uninhabited, contributes to the mystery, the mood, the anonymity imposed by fog.

Headlights cut through the veil, illuminating the scene but explaining nothing.

You imagine, as you ponder the painting, that the car's blinkers have been left on. And you wonder.

It is the gift of a painting to present only what it has to offer, only what is there, in that moment, leaving the rest up to the imagination or interpretation of the viewer.

The anticipation, the development of the story, the resolutions of questions evoked belong to the audience.

But what if the image became, not a movie, but moving. What if the blinkers did go on and off in the fog, if the ocean rolled with the tide, if the sun set, the moon shifted, the double yellow lines converged?

As much as he admires the power of a still image, artist Relja Penezic imagined it would add another dimension if he could make those parking lights blink.

This wasn't about inserting a light bulb into the canvas. This was an idea in keeping with the alchemy of art and electronics in the 21st century.

This was about converting fine art paintings into video art designed specifically for flat panel television screens.

In partnership with producer and managing director Susan Conklin, Penezic co-founded ARTaVIVA art video/motion paintings, "the new canvas of the 21st century."

As artistic director, he has created many of the paintings that will be "demonstrated" this weekend on Bang & Olufsen high-definition plasma TV screens, at Winfield Gallery in Carmel.

"Relja's take on that Southern California light, the way it eats away form, is unusual and uncanny," said Chris Winfield, artist and owner of his eponymous gallery. "He does not come from the same tradition as the plein-air painter, but something wholly other in his ability to capture that ambient light. And the icons of the highway and the cars are all very

California."

Penezic's paintings, their distinct realism abstracted by an exceptional use of light and space, lend themselves well to the subtle enhancement of movement and sound.

His perspective, his approach to the composition, coupled with his understanding and appreciation of video technology, made it happen.

"This kind of motion painting technology works with what I do," he said. "My landscapes or cityscapes or whatever scenes I do are a cross between symbolism -- what is the meaning of the landscape and, at the same time, realism, what is the real place. From there, it is about interpretation.

"For a realist, it is to see God in the majesty of nature; for an impressionist it is about the interplay of our perception and the play of light. The expressionist focuses on the mood or however they felt at that point, but they all are expressing something in the moment. It's not like I am reinventing the landscape but, in working at the beginning of the 21st century, I am aware of the shorthand used in visual communication."

The shorthand of the landscape for, say, Egypt, says Penezic, is pyramids, camels and palm trees.

If he paints anything else, say, a big cityscape, his viewers may not recognize it as Egypt.

Similarly, when he gives his viewer a car, a road, a telephone pole, juxtaposed with the ocean, the light and the fog, he has said, in his eyes, California.

Now add the undulations of the waves, the movement of clouds across a dark sky, the blinking lights of an abandoned car, and the viewer has been invited not merely to observe the painting, but to participate in it.

ARTaVIVA fine art motion paintings are set to music composed by Victoria Jordanova, a successful sound artist and composer, who is married to Penezic.

The addition of music, a time-based artistic medium, creates yet another dimension to the motion painting, the challenge of which, is to create sound that doesn't need to start, evolve or resolve but still must contribute the quality of music.

There is no beginning, no middle, no end. It's simply, playing.

Penezic is, admittedly, obsessed with time, a concept he believes, ironically, doesn't actually exist except as a construct by humans to understand the states of the material world around us. As a mindset, it must both enable and challenge his artistic expression.

"The crazy aspect of this," he said, "is to be obsessed with the theory that time doesn't actually exist, an idea which suits the still painting quite well. But motion exists in time. When you have time, things start, develop, happen and end. In these video paintings, there is motion but no indication of a beginning or an end, only the passage of time."

Pretty heady stuff for the guy who grew up, privileged, in what used to be Yugoslavia, and trained as a painter at the University of Belgrade, studying mid-European technique and perspective.

Admittedly, he was able to explore a little more of his own ideas in art during his graduate studies, before moving to Paris on a three-year art fellowship from the French government, where he spent another three years upon its completion.

After living in London, Moscow and New York, Penezic moved to San Francisco, where he got into digital pioneering and short film production, the results of which are shown at film festivals around the world.

His most recent show was an audio/video installation titled "Panopticon," at the Los Angeles Museum of Art.

Penezic's motion paintings will be accompanied at Winfield Gallery by the work of David Berry, a digital artist and filmmaker, who has worked primarily in film graphics and animation.

He began his career by working in visual effects on "Star Wars," which was followed by a decade of film work, including "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "The Empire Strikes Back," "Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan," "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Cocoon," for which he won an Academy Award for visual effects in 1986.

"David Berry is a long time friend of mine," said Penezic. "His career culminated when he won the Academy Award and decided it was time to make art out of his skills. He started doing that during the whole digital revolution and continues to explore artistic expression through digital media."

The beauty of creating art through a digital medium, of presenting motion paintings, says Penezic, is that it not only gives the owners of flat-screen TVs something to exhibit when the football game is over and the screen is vacant, but that it will enable more people to collect art.

"The problem with acquiring art," he said, "is that it's expensive. Fine art lives with rich collectors, and that's it. Video paintings could be a great Trojan horse to middle-class homes where people don't think they can collect art. If we make art to work exactly on those monitors they have, people can collect art on them instead of just watching TV."

What: New Video Landscapes by Relja Penezic and David Berry

Where: Winfield Gallery, Dolores btwn 7th & Ocean avenues, Carmel

When: Artists reception Saturday, Aug 6 from 5 to 7p.m.

Cost: Free and open to the public

Contact: 624-3369 or www.winfieldgallery.com