Huzjan’s painting is embedded in cyclical strings of images, descending in vertiginous spirals of spiritual embrace of the world towards unfathomable precipices in which answers to final questions lie hidden. Huzjan approaches painting as a ritual, through which he gives away his bared intimacy either with feverish, gestural applications of paint that resemble flesh, or by contemplative eavesdropping to gain the lyrical effects of the body of the painting. Although all of his images are seemingly imbued with a Thanatos-like pessimism he continues to enlighten them with a subdued but pervasive feeling of Eros that subverts the silent horror of nothingness into an active pain of uncertainty and risk, effort, and suffering, absurdity and love. Huzjan’s works are linked to Tisnikar’s through a similar feeling of anxiety, and the expressive propinquity of a special existential tension led one of the greatest Slovenian contemporary masters of expressive figurative art to create a series of images as a tribute to Tisnikar’s “world of the enlivened dead.

Text:: Marko Košan