Paintings, Salon of Savin, Žalec, 2006

Painting in translucent colours

Slovenian traditional landscape painting is typically marked with lyricism. It arises from the softness of the geographical space, moderate transitions in the colours of nature as well as the typical character traits of our people. These features first found an extraordinarily sensitive painterly expression in the works of Slovenian impressionists about a century ago. The painting styles of the subsequent generations kept changing, however, the softness of expression in rendering the landscapes prevailed.

Nataša Tajnik’s paintings seem to follow this suit. She is a representative of the younger generation of Slovenian female painters, and works in Velenje, a typical central Slovenian town, where a modern urban settlement with medieval roots is embedded into a picturesque natural ambient. Some of these features can be traced in the components of her painting style, especially in her interest in landscapes, where the elements of an expansive view are in a delicate relationship with the nuances of detail. Due to the abstract nature of her paintings it is often not very clear what is at the centre of her attention in a particular work of art, which is not the most important question in the interpretation of her work. Probably the most striking feature of her work (and also very difficult to comprehend) is a distinctive sense of space which she expresses through different painting techniques. Knowing that she is primarily interested in water, we soon realize that we know even less about these paintings than we first thought. For water, with its endless fluidity, versatility and close link with the origins of life, offers an infinite source of inspiration. It can speak about purely material aspects of the world and it can lead us to contemplate about our existence.

The author is aware of these different meanings and puts them into a context of modernistic techniques. She renders the landscape through abstract forms, translating the elements in a distinctly intimate way. In her work we can recognize quite a lot of what we can call a female character –especially in the way she applies the gentle nuances of a particular colour and searches for a harmonious whole.

Boris Gorupič