Ján Berge — Countryside Evening

The Nitra Gallery collection includes numerous works depicting agricultural and countryside themes, among which is also an image by the painter Ján Berger. His Countryside Evening features a rural motif of a little cottage with a fenced front yard. In front of the house in the grass – in one corner of the canvas – there is an animal with a woman standing next to it, while another bottom part of the image shows sketched containers (one for water, perhaps, the other one for grass?), which are an important part of farm life. Even though the work was created during the normalisation period, it had no influence on the dreamy character of the image. Through pink, coral, salmon and even carmine tones, we can explore a house with green window shutters, along with a blue triangle toward the top of the gable wall, suggesting a gable roof. The dreamy or even surreal colour scheme disrupts the otherwise ordinary and traditional depiction of a rural household. The actual folk features tend to be of less importance here. The predominating part is the colour palette and the way it attracts our attention. The cattle are not just brown, but also distinctively orange and the decorations on the folk costume of the villager tend to melt away and blend in with the other distinctive colours. The realistic motif thus receives abstract connotations. All the hard work and hurdles of rural life emerge in a new reality, full of colours and dreaming. 

Colour and its various variations and manipulation capabilities are a typical feature of Ján Berger’s work. His first solo exhibition was held at Nitra Gallery (formerly known as Nitra State Gallery). “He likes to cross borders. He often develops almost absurd games of colours, but also big epical narratives,” N. Gažovičová. Berger’s paintings often feature meditative or even contemplative characteristics. On one hand, they are static paintings, on another one, they are full of dynamics, emotions, lyricism. In the context of Slovak painting, the artist represents “a traditional painting position”, which is, in a certain sense, based on a traditional understanding of the term – the visual interpretation of his understanding and perception of reality represents a world full of coloured areas, stains, fragments, lines, unrelated and seemingly trivial details as well as a world of a lengthy painting process. As a painting personality, he has been crossing the borders of reality all his life with the help of almost absurdly colorised narratives. He has been balancing on the border of abstraction and readability. Sometimes it might his intent and sometimes intuition that wants us to get lost in the colours and depictions of his paintings so we can then find new possibilities of perception/reading/exploration.