The dystopian nightmare scenes in Čepin’s canvasses appear like paradigms of ‘New Romanticism’ tendencies, which reject the canons of high modernism outside and beyond any political context and, like a kind of timeless Mannerism, turn towards a visual form that merges the classical and romantic ideals of symbolic depiction of the existential. They function as a psychotic vision of the frozen silence of the unspeakable, and an all-encompassing metaphor for the discomfort of the world in which we live. This intuitive grasping for the unconscious is what brings Čepin’s paintings unmistakably closer to the shadowed world in which Jože Tisnikar was working like a great demiurge.

Text: Marko Košan