Jošt Snoj (b. 1967, Ljubljana) is a Slovenian painter working across four connected bodies of work: biblical-transcendent painting, historical-sacred painting, landscape, and portraiture.
Biography
Jošt Snoj was born in Ljubljana in 1967. In 1993 he graduated in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana under Prof. Gustav Gnamuš, with a thesis on Imago Pietatis and his first sacred paintings. In 1998 he graduated from the Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana with the thesis Iščem tvoje obličje (“I Seek Your Face”).
Between 2004 and 2008 he studied sacred Christian and other art and the Church’s cultural heritage at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, completing the programme with a master’s thesis on the theological-spiritual themes of St Ephrem the Syrian.
Since 1990, Jošt Snoj has painted and developed biblical-transcendent painting, and for even longer, landscapes with a transcendent quality. He also paints portraits. Following Berdyaev’s classification, his painting has been placed within “true realism” — the realistic depiction of transfigured life, of a new heaven and a new earth.
Artist’s statement
I experience art as a breakthrough into another world. This does not mean denying this world, but transcending it. Art carries this quality in its very nature, because it is an expression of the human spirit — a spirit that is breathed into us, created, and creative by nature.
Today it is no longer self-evident that art is something spiritual, higher, transcendent. Art has to do with inspiration, with spirit — spirit is the inspiration behind art; skill and technique come after. I have walked a path from modernism back to painting: to nature, to light, to the layering of many strata of colour, and in part to the imitation of nature.
In my experience, the artist separates from nature and reworks it, transforming it into something higher. Art is something intoxicating — a passage into another world that we sense lies beyond this one. Painting reflects this world and, at the same time, points toward the other world: first through pictorial means, through colour and light, and at times also through iconographic symbolism.
On my path back to painting, back to nature and to craft, I found kinship with post-impressionism (Grohar, Jakopič, Van Gogh), and also with a kind of existential, transcendent expressionism. My paintings carry a strong existential dimension: they express the dynamic of life in its tragic tension and also in its carefree vitality. I have often carried these qualities into my biblical-sacred paintings, into images of Christ — wanting to rework historical sacred painting and present it in a new, contemporary way, with strong pictorial elements of colour, matter, and light, not only symbolic ones.
I have been painting for over 40 years, and over time my work has settled into three or four bodies of work: biblical-transcendent paintings, landscapes, historical-sacred paintings, and portraits. These paintings are a search for meaning, for light, for God — a search for the passage from this world into the other, where a viewer, through their own spiritual and existential experience, can meet the transcendent.
— Jošt Snoj