Evgen Copi Gorisek is also an artist who plays with the limit between digital art and plastic art. The softness of the strokes and the delicate gradations that he applies to his paintings offer us the spectacle of an idealized reality, underlined by a white halo. The painter’s signature style shows us robust men and women, full of style and elegance, placed in bright and colorful environments. The subjects’ matte skin and bulging muscles are almost always in keeping with the beauty ideals of our over-mediated age. Nevertheless, the house of cards collapses when we notice that the faces are reduced to a few rigid and simplified features, petrified in a smile both eternal, rigid, and absurd. Everything was perfect, everything was beautiful and ideal, but these facial details totally overturn the interpretation of the painting, as if our subjects had been brutalized, had gone mad, and forced to keep their masks of contentment and bliss forever.
At the border of the real and the ideal, the true and the false, the plastic and the digital, Gorisek seems to show us that beyond appearances – which we can see through all our virtual networks, in a society that lives to show itself – there is often an insurmountable void. The woman in the swimsuit seems to be perfect, but in truth, she leaves us with a feeling of unease and falseness. This incomplete face reminds us that everything we see is only an image, what we see on this painting, as on a screen, is only tricks and virtuality.
