Slovene drawing II., Marko Košan, record of exibition, Mestna galerija Ljubljana, 2009.

Nataša Tajnik’s paintings and drawings have a distinctively engaged and sincere manner of expressing the emotional experience of a woman. They are devoid of militant feminism, but full of the subtle and refined exploration of intimate self-awareness, the awareness of her femininity, her instinctive and vital life force, and also the trauma and pain of coming face to face with shadows, which are inscribed in the unspoken chapters of our patriarchal culture and civilisation. The large format series of charcoal drawings entitled ‘Cantadora’ (Spanish for female narrator and preserver of old stories) reflect the direct experience from the adventures and travels to distant shores, intertwined with the associative network of fanciful debris – the stream of thought transformed from word to image and immersed in sensual, artistically-formulated and monochromic compositional structures, trapped in grayscale gradations. Cantadora’s hushed voice suggestively echoes out of this mental landscape of inwardly-turned interiors of the intimate, buried in the hidden layers of intuitive travels between the silt of feminine and general human spirituality.