Irina Subotić
JOŽE CIUHA – AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS
Throughout his life, Jože Ciuha has believed that the duty of a painter is to direct towards alle- giance, kindness, sincerity and humanness, just as he used to believe in his youth that a classless society could be established and could exist. He has no ambitions to correct with his works the countless human deviations, but this does not prevent him from steadfastly believing that the communication of his – and all other – paintings, mosaics, watercolours, drawings, illustrations, are as good as the communication of eternal truth. His entire life is refracted through those works, his inquisitive spirit, inventive character and his overall life principles. According to his statements, he understands creation as his great- est personal freedom, and that freedom is the result of an enormous engagement and the in- tellectual openness to the different and the new. Although diverse, his opus is in fact systematic and meaningful, broadly interconnected in the way Claude Lévi-Strauss discovered when he compared the European and Eastern cultures: contrary to our rational civilization which makes a sharp distinction between myth and history, for far away nations, such as the Japanese in the rst place, history and myths are linked and turned into a unique, magical „truth“ of pivotal impor- tance for the creation of stories, spaces, scholar- ship, studies… Still, no story is related only to one people and one time, but the entire history of all civilizations and all times is interconnected with still unknown threads that modern anthropology is striving to interpret: „It has been acknowledged that no civilization can conceive itself if it cannot compare itself to one or more other civilizations. In order to known and understand our own culture, we have to learn to observe it from the standpoint of another“, wrote Lévi-Strauss. With his works, Ciuha connects unexpected regions, personalities, ideas, spaces, and temporal distances.
Jože Ciuha has marked a whole epoch of Slovene and Yugoslav art of the second half of the twentieth century by pointing out local regionalism – the cultural milieu of the country to which he belongs, and with his life and creative ardour, he is still the example of a conscientious extension of modernism in the new millennium. And this proverbial diligence of Ciuha, his need to work, his youthful spirit and robust ability to upkeep the continuity of his creation for decades with obvious modernizations and even rejuvenations, have contributed to his permanent presence on the local, and maybe even more on the European artistic scene.
The eyes of the critics are today, as well as half a century before, steadily turned towards his work: like only a few artists, he is conscious of the significance of the imprints he has left behind. This is the reason for so many representative and study monographs, numerous catalogue entries by respectable critics and authors, particularly poets. On the other hand, young generations of art historians and gallery or museum curators are still discovering new interpretations of the meaning and value of his rich opus. That is the great pledge of the survival of Jože Ciuha’s artistic legacy. The other side of the coin is the official political support his works and his personal authority secured in certain historic moments, although he was brie y marginalized in other times.
Ciuha has been a free-lance artist throughout his life – apart from occasional temporary teaching in Western Michigan (Kalamazoo), at the Fine Arts Academy in Ljubljana, or Salzburg, Venice and the island of Šipan, where he held a painter’s school for years with seven artists from different parts of the world and individual coaching.He has had more than four hundred solo shows and more than three hundred group exhibitions; he has received an enormous number of awards and recognitions in his own country and in the world – something one rarely achieves in one’s lifetime…
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