Artistic duo MORTADELA, consisting of two Greco Roman weight class painters Evgen Čopi Gorišek (104 kg) and Nejc Franetič – Deso (105 kg), opend their first joint art show entitled Stay fat. This rip-roaring exhibiton of their latest work, which has opened at Zelenica Gallery on the first floor of autonomus social and cultural centre ROG (an abandoned bicycle factory) in Ljubljana on Thursday, January 19th, packed a full house of local skaters, art lovers and random bypassers. Deso and Čopi are both ripping skateboarders and skatepark builders. The team nicknamed their artistic merge mortadela and you could easily explain the exhibited paintings with the definiton of it: a large Italian ham sausage which incorporates one fifth small cubes of pork fat, flavored with spices, including whole or sometimes ground pepper, myrtle berries and pistachios. That’s exactly what the paintings on the walls of this small independent gallery represented, large fat peppered art, flavored with spices, with loads of details in a form of disproportionate portraits, vehicles, animals and other kind of everyday things. As the introduction note for this art show mentioned: »They don’t mind eating from the same plate or drinking from the same beer can, nevertheless drawing on the same surface.« Big art on big formats by big BIG boyz. – Tibor Rep

Did we mention the gallery was packed? Photo: Tomaž Šantl

We couldn’t get Evgen Čopi Gorišek to pose for us but lots of local skateres were hanging out in front of his big piece all night long. Photo: Tomaž Šantl

One of the two heavyweight art champions, Nejc Franetič – Deso (in the middle), posing for a double selfie with Tadej Vaukman. Vnuk from Proper Skateparks (on the right) considers it proper indeed. Photo: Tomaž Šantl

Animal liberation investigators checking out the little details on big canvases. Photo: Tomaž Šantl