Kamil Peteraj o Danielovi Bidelnicovi

Although I am not an art theorist or eminent expert on modern trends or styles, I am willing to say that Daniel Bidelnica affects me as a uniquely individual painter, as an artist, who does not belong to any aesthetically or conceptually defined group or clan, which, paradoxically, gives him the possibility to experiment, but always in the framework of the idea that he should not be a “slap in the face to public taste” but that his work should express the meaning of the life of a person in the post-modern epoch. The world is changing from day to day and much that was venerated doctrine only yesterday is empty phrases today. Bidelnica knows this well. He does not play at being a genius avowing baroque or ornamental forms, he does not pretend to create more content or form than his themes will bear, and, unusually, he is a painter who is not ashamed to admit that his works have some degree of purpose or attraction: His cycle Woman is an interesting attempt to penetrate into the mysterious psychology with which women fascinate us, but, at the same time, the “adornment” we see in them and around them, radiates a sort of discontent, something irritating, something, which breaks down the cosmetic flawless beauty into a multitude of questions: it is as if the dominant beautiful faces push us into a sort of submissiveness. They are more than seducers or rulers. At the same time, we also perceive another message: the colourful profligacy, romantic beauty, recalling the charm of the still-life and bouquet of flowers, but somewhere behind this, a feeling from the background of intruding everyday reality. In the cycle Greetings to a Woman, it is as if everything is reversed: in the foreground is the harsh “angular” reality and in the background, the element of feminine beauty as a gentle contrast. Daniel Bidelnica is not a one-level painter. More fatalistic, darker themes are also able to occupy him. Pictures like Too Much Smog, A Great Pretence or Memento indicate that he knows how to work with a minutely worked out motif just as well as with poster-sized resounding surfaces, which act as screening walls concealing the tension of our reality. His experiments with geometrical shapes are interesting. The shapes do not appear to belong to the same picture at first sight. It is as if they intruded there and showed the same lack of compactness or perhaps deliberately disturbed atmosphere of the work. I perceive this as a sort of estranging effect, as if the artist himself “stepped back” from his work and “brought it down to earth”, giving it the feeling of multiple spatiality, into which the viewer can enter. The present contradictory period often places us before complex problems, while the infantilization and levelling of values continues. At a time when good – evil and truth – lie prevail, when the essence is not sought, but the image, in a time of the total decline of aesthetic feeling, Bidelnica is one of the artists, who still respects a higher principle of artistic testimony, but knows how to combine it with the demands of the time. This is not a small achievement. This artist of monumental works, who does not deny his views even in one picture, has his public and he is achieving deserved success. Far from great declarations and scattering of wise speeches, he paints works, which may exasperate some, but please the overwhelming majority. The eternal is already today’s and this today’s is extremely contradictory. Perhaps this would sum up his philosophy. And I should add: The future will not only free us from illusions, but also pictures. Bidelnica knows this and it is as if I saw a piece of the present day in each of his pictures.

Kamil Peteraj

Writer and Poet