Art Critic’s choice, Cankarjev dom, Slovene Art Critics Asocciation, Ljubljana, 2009.
ART CRITICS’ SELECTIONS
Selection: Milena Koren Božiček; artist: Nataša Tajnik Stupar
Opening: Monday, 16 February 2008, at 13.00
STORYSCAPES
Postmodern landscapes and intimate interior scapes are the two scapes Nataša Tajnik Stupar investigates. Between them she weaves and intertwines in chain-like form the unconscious representation of personal reflection, dialogue with the self and the visual transmission of her story. Combining the past and present iconographic language is spontaneous and under development. She either preserves used and installed forms as a specialty of her personal iconography or they mature just like her life. Thus, phallic forms have developed into formidable strong helices (DNA) representing a pictorial diary of intimate recognition. The horizontals and verticals are strongly emphasised, creating a living space.
The notion of beauty enabled everyone from the Enlightenment theorists of sensibility to the Bloomsbury intuitionists to consider the idea, according to which aesthetic appreciation represents some kind of looking, as more or less self-explanatory. There are differences between pictorial and linguistic representations that belie only the pure pictorial side of language, whereas on the textual level these differences disappear. It is often the case when interpreting the pictorial that we confidently utilize a reading metaphor. Barnett Newman said that in this segment it is only nominated as art if the textual and the pictorial have risen above grammar and syntax. The concept of art and the work of art are the result of a spiritual state of the artist. Therefore, the imperative perception of each work of art is an external fact and not a dictionary of appropriate names and their artefacts from the past or present age. Everyone and everything (the individual, the work, the oeuvre) must be understood in the way closest to the artist’s understanding and not as a sequence of time and group definitions.
On a certain level art represents the central transformational role of the stage process. In modern art art itself becomes the object of art. However, modern art is not the zeitgeist indicator of today’s situation; it’s role is rather to convince us that it is being replaced by the postmodern era, because the latter recognises openness. Nataša Tajnik Stupar makes use of the possibility of developing modest features into an integrated game of forms so that they are differently identifiable on a formalistic, ornamental, geometric, stylised, symbolic or schematic level. They arise from a sensory perception of the atmosphere and not solely from an impartial curiosity about the image of the world or the creative reaction itself, nor in order to exclusively provoke a pleasant illusion. The artist feels the abstractness in a specific way and transposes it through new messages. In this process of transfer the essential role is not in the material existence, but in the factual role the messages take on or are subject to. In Advanced, conquering, invincible, (2008), Tajnik brings together the plurality of dynamic actions which reveal her attitude towards the surrounding world and her reactions to it, a world where her own personal story was created. The optics of the space are open, trajectories reach out with force in every direction. Colours are the most powerful and they fuel the painting in the real moment. The colours cross the set borders that are noticeable, but not too binding. Vertical double helices are the bearer of the central action and the spectator’s motivation, linking it together in translucent colour stokes to all other depths in this space, thus creating a space filled with harmony and stability of form. In the same way living organisms (plants, animals, etc.) and atmospheric and celestial phenomena (rain, sun, etc.) are beautiful in nature. In art this type of beauty is a rational relation to the representation of the pattern, therefore nature is in a way a model for art. In the interior scapes the pictorial form and well-being are the criteria by which we evaluate the beauty of the scene. We compare scenes amongst themselves.
Picturesque elements in individual interior scapes are arranged in the space as the result of human design and sensibility. In nature picturesque scenes are created analogue to the interior composition. Nataša Tajnik is very skilful in separating the picturesque of nature and of the interior scapes, while at the same time according them prominence and thus producing a new scene. This scene is a part of nature or the interior scape in a given field of vision and all of its dimensions. Therein are manifested feelings, thoughts, senses and values, combined together into meaningful objects, pertaining to the creative culture. Paintings conceptualised in this way are cultural artefacts which need to be interpreted more often for us to be able to experience and understand them more easily in all of their inherent meanings. Their value surpasses the process of accepting their existence as sensual phenomena. Art is, in all of its representations, concepts and feelings an evolutionary means of the highest degree for both the time in which it exists as well as the time in which it will have to survive.
Milena Koren Božiček
