Uros Paternu Biography

BIOGRAPHY

          Uroš Paternu was born on 3. December 1972 in Kranj, Slovenia.  

     From 1991-1995 he was studying painting and he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he also received the Master Degree in painting in the year 2000.  In the year 1996 he received the National Slovenian »Prešeren« Award for the painting »Wet living green«. And in the same year he also received the First prize for a postgraduate study from Ivan Napotnik Cultural Centre, Velenje. Only three years after graduating from the Academy he presents his first independent and comprehensive exhibition in Gallery  Keleia, in Slovenia.

     In 2015 he was awarded with 2 Prix Award, International Exhibition Art Resilience,  Musée de Peinture de Saint - Frajou, France. On the invitation he become an associate member of the Art Resilience movement in France.

     His work appears in various publications and his paintings are represented in corporate and private collections. Internationally his paintings have been exhibited in Japan, Italy and France.

     He lives and paints in Ljubljana, Slovenia. 

     In these post-digital times when the world is inundated with visual impressions of flashing images, in their hollow and perpetually formative existence, the artworks of Uroš Paternu are like islands that attract the viewer with their inner content and open up new questions which allow the viewer to meet himself face to face. The paintings are like mirrors that reflect his spirit, they are an initiation into spiritual concentration and ethical attitude. They are feelings of everything that has happened and will happen, feelings of horror, peace and joy.

     Uroš Paternu developed his recognizable and unique visual language in the nineteen with the theoretical interpretation of his own creative process, which is characterized by artistic analysis and systematisation.

     The artist sees the art of painting as a way to harness his thoughts and to ground the objects and the world around him on the basis of a dialectic relationship between the spiritual-conceptual and the physical-material, which is established by transposing the concrete empirical matter into its visual articulation. This passage from the physical to the spiritual, from immanence to transcendence, from observing to seeing, from reflexion to catharsis, starts with the first stroke of the brush and lives on in the viewer's perception.

     Although abstract art is an embodiment of the artistic freedom of expression it remains bounded within the laws of the painting media. The fundamental structure of each and every painting contains the author's concentration, sensitivity, contemplation and experience, which are inseparable from it and trickle through its layers as a contemplative mystery which the viewer discovers gradually, not at first glance, but through a process of perception, creative inspection and growth.

     The basic and most active agent and content of the artistic creation of Uroš Paternu is the color in all its range and dynamics, attitudes and relationships, in violations of the rules and freedom from them with an inner depth and visual form. More than the expressive or emotive expression of the morphological elements of the creation, Uroš Paternu favors their contemplative, universal side.

     He never uses colors as an empirical, associative, symbolic or evocative visual element, but rather eludes the mimetic and referential framework of perception. In color he searches for its dematerialized nature which in a creative process becomes a carefully thought-out composition, an echo of the artworks that resonates in the viewer's perception and gives the impression of being a vibrating living organism.

     His approach to the bare canvas consists of a ceaseless quest for new solutions, as if »hunting for prey« during which skill, deep concentration and determination are the decisive factors catching the eye of the spectator with an independent and perfected visual reality.

     The paintings come into being with either thoughtful or impulsive strokes, with smooth or rough applications of paint. The perceptive depth is created by sophisticated spatial cuts, color metamorphosis, internal segmentation of the color field and overlapping layers of color, from underneath of which allusive images from the deeper strata surface into existence.