Visiting Matej Čepin’s Studio: where images do not simply emerge, but take hold

The first impression already said a great deal. The brushes were not arranged like tools prepared for demonstration or photography, but set aside in the way one sets aside something that is in constant circulation: tired, burdened with layers of paint, almost fossilized by previous gestures. Around them lay cloths, dried tubes, remnants of pigment, stains, and surfaces built up in layers that testify to a long, almost bodily relationship with painting. In such a studio, one quickly understands that the works are not made from a distance. They arise from proximity, from repetition, from rubbing, correcting, layering, and insisting. Everything carries the sense that painting, for Matej Čepin, is a slow matter—not an image to be produced, but a site to be inhabited.
On the shelves, tubes of oil paint are stacked tightly beside one another like a small archive of intensity. There is nothing accidental in this material disorder. It belongs to the working order of a painter who knows that everything must remain within reach when a scene begins to open. And in Čepin’s case, scenes open in unusual ways: as if they come from an in-between zone somewhere among dreams, village mythology, personal memory, literary fragments, and spaces that cannot be entirely placed in real time. His paintings do not function as illustrations of stories, but as frozen excerpts from a larger, not fully spoken narrative.
The longer one looks at the individual works, the stronger that feeling becomes. Figures appear as witnesses to something that has just happened, or something yet to come. Some are almost theatrical, others withdrawn, others grotesque, yet never banal. His world is populated by solitary figures, processions, groups that are together yet each enclosed within themselves, by architectures that function less as buildings than as psychological signs, by open landscapes filled with silence, though never emptiness. Everything is charged, even when it appears still.
One of the special qualities of Čepin’s painting lies precisely in this duality: on the one hand the restraint of the palette—earth tones, greys, blacks, muted greens, and dirty whites—and on the other a world of motifs that continually slips into a symbolic, almost hallucinatory sphere. Above a group, a figure hovers. In the distance stands a tower. To one side, a fire burns. Someone carries a suitcase. Someone turns away. Someone remains fixed in a pose that is at once theatrical and utterly silent. None of this feels like an explanation of the world, but rather like one of its symptoms.
That is precisely why the selection of works for ArtStorage was all the more compelling, and also demanding. With an artist like this, one does not simply choose “beautiful” paintings or works that would be most immediately accessible to a broader audience. One selects nodal points within his world. One looks for those works that can, even in small or medium formats, retain the tension of the larger oeuvre. One looks for paintings that do not yield too easily, but also do not exclude the viewer. One looks for the right balance between intimacy and force.
Walking among the works, it became clear that scale is an important part of the experience in Čepin’s practice. His smaller paintings are not sketches in the sense of preparation for something larger, but independent, condensed events. They often hold the same intensity as the large canvases, only compressed into a quieter, more interior register. A small dark painting with two figures nearly disappears into the wall, and yet it anchors the gaze precisely through that apparent silence. Elsewhere, a solitary man appears beside some sort of apparatus, almost like a scene from a vanished film. In another painting, a group of figures leaning over a surface suggests ritual, investigation, or conspiracy. All of these works possess an inner dramaturgy that does not reveal itself at once.
Then there are the larger canvases, where his world expands into something almost stage-like. One such image, which remains in the body long after the visit, is a large painting with an open, dark lower field into which tiny, nearly absurd actors—garden gnome-like figures with red caps—are distributed. Above them unfold space, trees, a cross, a building, a distant group, and a central figure suspended somewhere between myth and memory. This is not a painting one can “read” in a single glance. It is a painting one enters gradually, like a landscape with its own logic, its own temperature, its own dark humor. Such works confirm that Čepin is a painter of atmospheres rather than merely of motifs.
Another especially revealing moment of the visit was the wall covered with collaged images, cut-outs, titles, fragments of text, and visual cues. Such walls are often more truthful than statements. They reveal what accompanies the artist, what agitates him, what repeatedly draws him back to certain tonalities of image and meaning. In Matej Čepin’s case, this wall did not feel like a decorative inspiration board, but like a mental map. Black-and-white faces, old photographs, cinematic atmosphere, erotic fragments, textual snippets, irony, melancholy, an absurd cut into everyday life—all of this helped make clear that his painting does not grow only out of a formal pictorial problem, but from a much broader cultural and psychological sediment. His paintings are densely inhabited even when they show very few figures.
At one point, the visit moved outside as well, to a metal table in the courtyard in front of the studio. Such pauses are essential during studio visits. Only in conversation, outside the immediate pressure of the images, do many things begin to settle into place. That is often when it becomes clear whether the works truly stand on their own, or whether it is only the artist’s explanation that holds them together. In Matej Čepin’s case, the opposite was true: the conversation was not necessary for the works to function, but it did open additional layers of their inner necessity. This is an important distinction. Strong works do not require explanation in order to endure. They require only a sufficiently attentive viewer.
For ArtStorage, the selection of works therefore became above all a process of listening to the paintings. Not in terms of likeability or immediate effect, but in terms of what they can carry. Which paintings retain enough tension to enter another environment on their own? Which speak Čepin’s language most clearly? Which reveal the breadth of his practice—from intimate, almost barely spoken scenes to larger, more complex compositions? And which will preserve outside the studio what feels so present within it: the sense that one is not facing an image that seeks to please, but one that insists on remaining.
The selection for ArtStorage therefore followed precisely this logic. Not the most decorative works, nor the most easily legible paintings, but those that most faithfully carry the artist’s poetics. Works in which darkness, humor, vulnerability, theatrical stillness, and a slightly unsettling beauty meet. Works that contain something narrative, yet are never exhausted by narration. Works that inhabit a space and continue to resonate within it.
The visit to Matej Čepin’s studio was a reminder of why personal contact with the artist is so important for ArtStorage. An artwork is not merely an object; it is not only a painting as format, technique, and signature. It is the trace of a way of thinking, a discipline, an inner necessity. When one sees brushes heavy with paint, tubes barely holding their pigment, walls covered with visual fragments, large canvases leaning against small ones, and senses that all these images belong to the same world, selection becomes something other than a curatorial decision. It becomes an act of recognition.
With Matej Čepin, that recognition is clear: his painterly world is singular, mature, and unmistakable. His images do not shout, yet they remain. They do not explain themselves easily, yet they leave an imprint. They are dark, but not closed; ironic, but not cynical; narrative, but never fully told. And that is precisely where their force lies. For ArtStorage, such works are valuable not because they follow a trend or fulfill an expectation, but because they persist in something rarer: their own truth.