Milan Mrkusich | Important Paintings From the Studio
26 July - 30 August 2024
I have never been to China. Even though as I write that I know it’s not strictly true. Like many people I knew in the 1970’s, I have travelled there endlessly in my imagination. In the thrall of the People’s Republic of China, I was one of those naively wearing a Chairman Mao cap, dreaming of being a Kung Fu Master and learning the Yin from the Yang.
China offered new ways of thinking and as it’s borders slowly opened to Westerners the marvel of its history, art and philosophy allowed the borders of our own thinking to expand too. In a world hurtling towards its potential demise through the single-minded greed of our capitalist trajectory, the history of Eastern philosophy seemed to offer a potential for different ways to think about balance, harmony, and synthesis. Non-duality, that was the key. Not this or that, but a this and that constantly circulating in an ever-changing spiral.
Milan Mrkusich also appears to have travelled to China in his imagination and to embrace the new ways of thinking to be found there. Notes written by him at the time of painting Chinese Elements of 1989 mention the yin-yang dynamic, but focus more on the Five Activities – Water, Fire, Wood, Metal and Earth, the agencies at work in all natural processes. Five directions, five primary colours, five sacred animals. An ordered system of four directions – North, South, East and West, with the Earth, Man, and the colour Yellow at the centre.
In the West the primary colours, those from which all other colours in the spectrum arise, are only three; red, blue, and yellow. The Chinese system adds white and black to the primary colour list. This addition of what in the West are generally thought of as non-colours, adds extreme tonal qualities of light and shade to the way colour can be thought about. It brings colour into an endlessly changing system of white to black and back again through the chromatic scale of reds, blues, and yellows. In this the Chinese Elements series, Mrkusich fully exploits the addition of white and black to the list of essential colours. Each colour in turn paired with black and a range of black-white mixes, giving him a full tonal range in each work, and letting the light become his subject.
In the hands of a painter, colour becomes light. This series of works by Mrkusich are fully lit. The yellow, a blaze of afternoon sun; the red, fiery and glowing from within; green, more sombre in tone, blueish like dying light. The transformation of colour into light is transmitted through layers of thinnish, scumbled colour, one layer brushed over another and another in successive moments to build up the glowing surfaces. Freedom is found through these overlays of colour within the seemingly geometrically ordered works. The many layers of thinly applied semi-transparent, acrylic polymer paint soften as we view them as if responding directly to our gaze.
These are works then, that while laid out in organised rectangles, live as organic forms that appear to shift and move within their perimeters. A quiet dynamism is achieved by the shifting surfaces of laid down colour. Active, luminous, and non-dualistic. We have darkness and light. Within the light other lightness, and the dark shifts in our gaze between cloudy days and the black of night. A spiralling endless movement that brings the works to life before our eyes.
- Judy Millar, 2024