Silvester Plotajs Sicoe: Zen Lays Hidden in Punk Nature

The painter established himself with his highly distinctive style in the first decade of the new millennium, a period initially dominated by artists seeking original ways of entering the sublime with their takes on abstractionism. Can we then claim that Plotajs is the protagonist of a new anti-pop generation: a generation whose main and ever-present creative impulse is hedonism, and whose additional starting point for narration are images of public idols and other fetishized human and animal characters, its own conventional inventory. A latent presence of human existence, its processes and activities, is invariably felt throughout; such a painterly reflection is always positive and, of course, abounding in colours exalted to the point of apotheosis.
Considering the Neue Wilden (i.e. new Fauves), a German neo-expressive movement and their Slovenian paraphrase – a group of painters who went by the name of Divji v srcu (Wild at Heart), does Plotajs’ painting bear traces of neo-expressionism? We can answer in the affirmative, whereby referring to the painter's signature style, which does not fit into the ideology of the aforementioned historical German group, but indulges in its own, visceral stories, which of course can stylistically also indirectly tap into recent art history. In this sense, we also understand the artist's neologism “punk cubism” – the so-called series of paintings created in 2020/21 which includes the exhibited work.
Punk as a musical genre generated by so-called subculture apparently has remained in Plotajs’s memory even today, when existing in remix, while in the exhibited painting geometricized characters surface only as a reminiscence of cubism. The painting forming part of the aforementioned punk cubism series undoubtedly stems from a particular, artist’s own emotional reticence, both in terms of its motifs and the vibrantly jaundiced yellow surface.

Is this the reason for the subtitle about the hidden zen? If zen is associated with calmness, balance, attention, wisdom, harmony, order, even asceticism and insensitivity, and this is what makes it appealing to us Westerners, then the answer to the question about a certain red thread of zen is: dealing with the human mind and ego.

The artist thus succeeded in providing an honest, compelling answer for this particular painting.
Aleksander Bassin

Silvester Plotajs Sicoe 
Silvester Plotajs Sicoe was born on 12 April 1965 in Ljubljana. He graduated under Professor Emerik Bernard from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana in 1988 and continued his postgraduate studies in painting with Professor Gustav Gnamuš and in graphic arts with Professor Lojze Logar. In 1990 he studied with Professor Martin Tissing at the Minerva Art Academy in Groningen, the Netherlands. He has worked as a freelance artist since 1992. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 1987 Prešeren Award for Students, the 2009 University of Ljubljana Award for Important Artistic Achievements in the field of painting, the 2013 Richard Jakopič Distinction and the 2021 Richard Jakopič Award. He has taken part in group exhibitions and held many solo exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, most recently Punk kubizem (Punk Cubism) at the Švicarija Art Centre in December 2021 and the group exhibition Divji v srcu (Wild at Heart) at the Kvartirna hiša Gallery Celje in October 2021. He is a freelance artist based in Ljubljana.