PAINTINGS 2006

My king, I am just like you
2006, oil on canvas, 138×154 cm
My King, I am just like you
2006, oil on canvas, 138×154 cm
I am the captain of my ship
2006, oil on canvas, 69×102 cm
I am the captain of my ship
2006, oil on canvas, 57×78 cm
I am the captain of my ship
2006, oil on canvas, 69×102 cm
I am the captain of my ship
2006, oil on canvas, 61×79 cm
I am the captain of my ship
2006, oil on canvas, 144×158 cm

 

 

 

 

Natalija Šeruga enters the postmodern period bravely and without fear. Her series Night is accompanied with elegiac subtitles, read in verse like poetry, like a poetic and at the same time grotesque tale of art in the dark. At first sight, the images seem to escape the censorship of reason. We can only grasp them as allusions, as interpretation of a fantasy background to the event depicted. They both irritate and attract, create unease, destroy our peace and quiet. The imagery is dominated by the central icon and motif of the prehistoric idol of Venus. Is this the case of The Vestonic Venus, from the Aurignac age? Abstract stylisation of figures made of stone or clay, ivory or bone, with exaggerated feminine characteristics (big breasts, belly and buttocks), symbolising fertility and motherhood. Less care was lavished on the head; the head-dress may even be covering the face. Unease and fear of women who have the natural gift of giving birth obviously has prehistoric origins. Woman as carrier of the original sin, sexual fantasies and temptation (Socrates called her "a moral mistake" and Freud "a dark continent"). With the spread of Christianity, she acquired demonic proportions, in the shape of the devil incarnate, the adulteress. As the object and subject of desire, she facilitated the purity of the man and the salvation of his soul. The painter for example depicts the rite of punishment of the Sorceress Venus in her diptych 'The Place of Musty Reputation'. The mystery of death at the stake, the beginning and the end are determined and symbolised by the background with suggestive branches and the relationship between the cold blue and the smoky, fiery application of colour.

While trying to decipher the phantasmagorical scenario of the works by Šeruga, we inevitably confront the dilemma of how to read the message, we study the "demonic" dimension of the arabesques, we think about the archetypes and the symbols, about the Dance of Salome and the head of St John the Baptist, about the death in the river Mura, about fear and the eternal darkness, about the male and the female principle and, last but not least, about the tactile-cum-sensuous relationship of the artist to the canvas. The latter is both the physical canvas and the body which is being pierced, fixed by the needle to the metal framework. The visually powerful images are wrapped in the veil of multiple meanings. We are entering the empty space, where logic and the predictable are no more. "The constituent gap between the explicit symbolism and its phantasmagorical background is obvious in every work of art. The site always takes priority before the element that occupies it. Thus even the most harmonious work of art is a priori fragmented, deficient as regards its siting; the 'knack'of artistic success lies in the artist's ability to turn this deficiency to advantage, i.e. the artist needs to handle the central emptiness and its resonance in the surrounding elements."*

* Slavoj Zizek; The Phantasm Plague, Analecta, Ljubljana 1997, p. 37.

Mateja Podlesnik
(From the catalogue Triptych, Municipal Gallery Ljubljana, 2006, Slovenia.)