Artworks by Leonard Rubins
DIRECTING HIS OWN IMAGINATION FROM COMBINED TECHNIQUES TO COMPUTER GRAPHICS
The paintings and the computer graphics of Leonard Rubins are extremely interesting and challenging for his public. First, because of his unusual visualizations as compared to the existing artistic guidelines of representation in Slovenia. As for the contents, intimate iconography mixes with the traditional historical iconography in an unusual and original way. As for his response to the tempting beauty of trumpery, capricious citing of history and fantastic assemblings he is close to special fantasy and celestial art, as for perfected formalism he is closest New media-visual art. Enigmatic stories are eclectic mixtures of Christian iconography and the typology of the good (Madonna, angels, sweet-tempered figures taken from cartoons...) and the evil (Satan, bats, snakes, wolves...) and their semantic relativisations through the evocation of archetypes and alchemic unions of opposite poles. Everything is interwoven with rich individual significations of dreams in abundant and glittering fantastic worlds. Graphically complex and colourful cosmic and earthly landscapes and cityscapes. Celestial architectures are sometimes close to surrealist scenographies of thirties and fourties, or to science-fiction comics, which use mannerist style for cityscapes or even to curious Ferrara renaissance. Motives from nature are also frequent. Rubins' scenes are exact sceneries, being lost in space within the renaissance horizon. Rubins is the director of his own imagination, when uniting different worlds in one harmonious world, where existing and ready-made elements do not present a hindrance, on the contrary, he uses them in a fantastic story of his own making. His worlds are always tender and sweetish, with aesthetic corrections of the frightful, thus never really dreadful, but rather a magical sinking into dreams. Leonard Rubins freely changes mediums or combines classical approach of manual painting with a brush, with photography and collage and supplements them with programmed computer possibilities. Photography can as well be used in the new medium, collaged - assembled and intervened by means of painted effects or additions. The brush, the mouse or the electronic pencil represent manual intermedium, not of the central importance. The author's aim is to use whatever medium, from photographic collage, acrylic, computer graphics or a combination of any of these techniques - where a medium remains a medium - it is merely the means to achieve the desired effect, which means, that the medium is not used for its own sake. Mediums are only means for the presentation, visualisation of rich inner experience for Rubins, or simply a new possibility.
Alexandra Kostic
