N A T A L I J A Š E R U G A
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PAINTINGS 2009 (The Return of the Native)
Behind Nine Rivers and Nine Mountains ... Everything that has been written about the paintings of Natalija Šeruga is no doubt true. Everyone who has written about her various themes, from the beginning until today, has arrived into her world with his or her own perspective and has searched through it. But if painting is nothing more than searching, if it can guide your words (written or spoken) to another place at a given moment - to the object that hides between your legs, to all the painful and magical things in life - than writing about art can also be a sort of search. When we try to interpret the opus of an artist, we may be led astray, but never mistaken, if we simply direct attention to the paintings themselves and let them speak to us with their own particular form and content. The paintings of Natalija Šeruga are enigmas, filled with obstacles that avert the inquisitive gaze from the essence of the painter's message, from her most intimate searchings. Unravelling these riddles, it becomes clear that any rational approach to them is senseless because you are soon abandoned in unmapped terrain. Quotidian dedication to painting has transformed Šeruga into a meditative and attentive artist who is nor overwhelmed by the capability for amazement, admiration, and enthusiasm over such a simple thing as an image. I first experienced the visual art of Natalija Šeruga more than a decade ago and immediately realized that it possessed an undefined magnetism that irresistibly attracts. I was completely taken by a glance into her translucent prints exhibited at the annual student exhibition of the Ljubljana Academy of Visual Arts. When you are completely taken with a certain image, your critical faculties are relegated to a secondary plane because the object has essentially taken you over. In the case of Šeruga's work, I felt a special relationship with the extremely subtle and fairy tale fragile but also existentially imaginative images. It was the closest kind of relationship, the kind that always remains a part of you. Of course, each picture and each form of artistic expression does not exert the same power on every viewer. The viewer can find himself in the interesting situation of regarding the artist's denuded intimacy and instead facing an image of his own. Regarding the motifs of Šeruga's recent works (bones, skulls, antlers, cypresses), the viewer is forced to construct a critical relationship to his own intimate world and only then can he comprehend the artist's message. The tendency to search the space of life is one of the characteristics of human nature and, with it, we are able to transform existing worlds and create new ones. This desire is focused not only on the real world; Šeruga is also interested by the invisible and unknown world of human thoughts in which other worlds exist, worlds that she tries to perceive and understand, protect and nourish. The motif of worlds interwoven in these images is diverse, dominated by mystical images of landscapes and their details. What we feel above all in these works is the artist's desire for the disintegration of reality, for its sublimation. The light is captured in new dimensions that are increasingly removed from worldly (self) questioning, and come closer to invisible forces and extremes that reign in the invisible and the illusory, the dream and fairy tale spheres. The focus of the imaginary light represents its own enigma and symbolizes the source and birth, regeneration and rebirth. The artist treats light in the paintings like an internal illusionist light source, as if the light is coming from behind and shining through the darkened foreground. If her previous works achieved the seeming illumination of the visual field, these new paintings fuse with the concrete glowing intensity made possible by light. Light, which along with colour and brush strokes belong among the most important painterly elements, has acquired in Šeruga's paintings an essential meaning. In certain images, the light fades to a transparent whiteness; in others, its stimulating flow is revealed in other colours: sunny yellows, blues, violets ... With colour and form, with the investigation of space and light, with the construction of unusual elements carefully selected by the artist, an inner vision is released and develops on the picture field in a way that logic cannot explain. The real image fades and what remains is only its abstract essence. Sometimes, Šeruga's images appear erased to a degree that only the form remains, triggering various associations. Sometimes, a formal duality is present that leads to a substantive contrast: real-unreal, illusory-concrete, expected-shocking. The paintings are characterized by visions of eternity and timelessness, the suggestive power of which the viewer pulls into himself. There is no doubt that Šeruga is also inspired by nature. Is the Return to Native Places - if we think of the title of the show - one of the answers she has been searching for in her paintings? Regardless of the substantial influence of her surroundings and the artist's direct experience of them, Šeruga's purpose appears to be the precise opposite: concrete scenes are presented in order to speak of hidden content. Although the fundamental purpose and motif are simple, we sense in the basic expression that each fragment and each minimal emotion in these images can be elevated to a universal truth. The images, which are painted on a canvas that is stretched like skin on a metal carrier, give the appearance of a fairy tale richness that could easily be a decoration from times and places that are unknown to us. In today's world of corrupt and impersonal values, Šeruga's work function as a totally private space where the full scope of life is present. Her images still carry in them traces of love and pain, passion and death. And as much as the aesthetics of the sublime are characteristic in Šeruga's paintings, so too is the way the almost morbid scenes have both a spiritual and visual attraction. Without her previous works, it is certain that the painting from the current series, Return to Native Places, would not be what they are. The multi-meaning paintings that have emerged in previous series as a poetic search for answers to the most taboo questions about existence, life, and death nevertheless present images of a provisional internal harmony and fusion with the universe. The space in Šeruga's paintings is, on the one hand, eternal and boundless, a spiritual dream universe, and, on the other hand, an edifice of works that function as an orderly whole. Just as she has been to her motifs (gardens, cypresses, hollow figures), the painter has been faithful from the very beginning to the stitching of the canvas to the iron under-frame. In the current series, the upper and lower part of the painting are stitched with a straight edge in a colour similar to the painting, chosen deliberately for that reason. The focus of the gaze upon the picture does not need to shift. The point of vision is directed to the centre, regardless of the composition of each image. If Natalija Šeruga's previous paintings were inspired with the words of poets, writers, and philosophers, and maintained a distance from her most intimate moments, her new images are inundated with intimacy. The stitches are an important part of the painting but they attain a new meaning because of their distance from the painted images. Are the countless stitches countless entries into the image? Or are these the wounds and pain needed to find the right path back to the self? Or are they there for the same reason that the painter flattened the painting, to more easily enter her (own) image? To more easily return home? Turning points and boundary stones stop the flow and force you to find a new path toward fulfilling your needs. But nothing is simple. You do not arrive at the top, at ecstasy, at love along a straight path. The more difficult the path, the sweeter the victory. As in a fairy tale: There, behind nine rivers and nine mountains, there where I am at home ... Tatjana Pregl Kobe
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