Liebe gegen Angst

On the artist

For one and a half decades Žiga Okorn has devotedly pursued the quest for an image that would invite, reconcile or heal by touching our profound artistic experience, which is associated with empathy, sensation as well as compassion and love. These fragile, simple images, which the painter with earthly pigments and some drops of water literally pours over the paper or canvas, open up perspectives that we actually experience internally, but fail to realise sufficiently externally. They are the invocations of our sensitive yet forceful conditions, where mind and body, reason and hand, the head and the heart are interconnected.
The watercolours of children, in front of which the viewer stands as if confronting his own future, are fashioned so elementarily that it is hard to overlook them. To overlook and not let oneself be touched by them, let them touch the place in us where still a tiny child resides, a child who is waiting for us to view the world through its wide-open eyes. What it is watching and feeling is here and now, is omnipresent and eternal. The “here-present” is unfathomable already through language, unreachable neither through imagining not projecting, it is a creative process and a part of ourselves. The artistic basis of an image, which shows proclivity towards both the Western and Eastern art, addresses us in a language that – since it has faith in skill and is acquainted with tradition – makes space for imagination and the viewer’s inventiveness.