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Egoism and narcissism are the themes of the solo exhibition "Selfi(sh)" by Elvis Berton, which opens on Friday, July 1 at 8 pm in the Gallery Pet kula in Motovun, organized by the Association Fotovun.
The artist from Pazin started working on a cycle in which he reacted to the phenomenon of selfies in 2016. "Until then, I had not taken a single selfie or felt any need for it. I thought the outside was just a wrapper, cellophane and it was more important to me to show what I was creating and what came out of my inside than to photograph myself. But I was intrigued by the idea of how to make this kind of self-portrait in my own, different way. I realized that the common link of my works through the entire artistic activity is my signature. I sign pictures infantile, like a child just learning to write, with misspelled letters. It is common for the signature as the least visually important part of the artwork to stand somewhere on the edges or corners of the painting, but I enlarged, multiplied it and in some works filled most of the canvas with it, thus using it as the main motif. Since photographing myself or, in my case, putting my name in the spotlight is an egocentric and selfish act, I (self-ironically) called the cycle Selfie, ”explained Berton.
In the preface, the curator of the exhibition, Vilma Bartolić, points out that the distinctive signature of deliberately distorted and uneven letters, written in a way reminiscent of clumsy and clumsy children's handwriting, appears in the earliest works of Elvis Berton and runs from cycle to cycle. "The signature thus becomes the author's flag, a recognizable feature, it has the same importance as any other artistic or content element in the painting. Over time, the infantile letters in some compositions will become increasingly important, the signature will multiply and even become independent, and will become the only content of the work. By focusing on his first and last name and his repeated spelling, he delves into a slippery zone of complacency and narcissism. It is this character trait, but not that of the artist, although it is not excluded either, but the characteristic of contemporary society that is subjected to irony and criticism in a thematic cycle called Selfie (sh) ", said curator Vilma Bartolić.
Berton's exhibition Selfie (sh) in Motovun's Pet kula gallery can be viewed until August 4 every day from 9 am to 8 pm.
Elvis Berton was born in 1970 in Pazin. He has been exhibiting since 2000 at 36 solo and more than seventy group exhibitions in the country and abroad (Austria, USA, Great Britain, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Slovakia, Slovenia, Italy, Bosnia and Herzegovina). He has won several awards and recognitions. Since 2008 he has been a member of the Croatian Society of Fine Artists, and since 2014 of the Croatian Association of Independent Artists. He lives and works in the vicinity of Pazin.
