The Story within me, exibition of drawings, Gallery Prison, Koper, 2005.

Escape again, charcoal on paper, 100×80 cm, 2005.

The story within me

“The story is told” is the title the drawings from this exhibition were first presented under. The exhibition tells of a full circle, of a story as a whole. The title Stories (Zgodbe) gives the series of drawings a different meaning. In the former form there was a certain story, told in a certain way. The drawings represented individual points and led the viewer down the path from the beginning to the end. With a change in title the story breaks apart. Now every image tells its own story but we do not know where the story comes from. Is it being told by the picture? Or is the picture only there for the viewer to find it within himself? We can presume that drawings come from the story. The depicted motifs come from confrontations in day-to-day life. Confrontations with thoughts, feelings and emotions, which are born from interaction of memories and directly experienced reality. Some are like diary entries, where the experienced feeling is imprinted, others are interwoven with contemplation, which had been crouching behind the eyebrows for quite some time. The images show the artist’s direct confession of her confrontations, which are in a symbolic language drawn before our eyes.

Almost like a vision or a dream they vibrate on the surface of uncertainty. Solid constellations of symbols that perform a play want to tell a story, but in the end they are left as allegories in an indefinable space. And of course independent of our time. But above all, independent of one another. The question to ask is, whether this is a freeing of each image, each confrontation? The freeing does take place, because from an actual and therefore everyday, banal story coincidental fragments are being crystallized. Coincidental just like life itself is.

Ever since I wove my own story from these images I cannot let go of it. Some drawings could without a guilty conscience be put into a fully sensible sequence. Some could be set up as parallel universes, visions that follow and foresee the story. The story I wove for myself is a tragic one, just like the atmosphere in the paintings is tragic. Fear, isolation, some tenderness and relaxation, then again spasms, pain and screams, loneliness and despair and even some cynical humour. It tells of a man’s battle against himself, against aimless wanderings, which lead him away from confidence in his own path, and lastly, it tells of a battle against life itself. This is a roughly described story, which most people can compare to their own, and that makes it a common and everyday story. There is nothing special in it, nothing that would change the world. But the commonness is nevertheless the most static part of every story. What was exceptional in “The story is told”, with its distinct storyline, is in the present exhibition transformed into a generalness of individual images. The images themselves do not concern anyone in particular. But, when looked at from a different point of view, the same exceptionality is transferred to the exceptionality of each individual viewer, who personally submerges himself into the images’ world and there experiences his own story anew.

Vasja Nagy