As a sensitive youth in May 1945, Tisnikar was faced with the hopeless scene of fleeing defeated armies. At the end of the great war, the Mislinja valley was flooded with armies, where battles were still going on even after the official end of World War II in Europe. Bodies scattered across fields and meadows, wandering horses and oxen torn from the harnesses of overturned carts, desperate masses and mass graves full of bodies… These are the elements of Tisnikar’s reminiscences, depicted many years later in his canvases – but not as an expression of moralising convictions of the delusional misunderstandings of human vanity, and even less so as a pathetic call for justice. What is unveiled in Tisnikar’s paintings are hallucinatory images of the horrors of war, imprinted in the mental patterns of a personal confession and exalted to universal message about the tragic aberrations of the mankind.

Text: Marko Košan