N A T A L I J A Š E R U G A
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PAINTINGS 2007 (Armamaxa)
Natalija Šeruga's first major, impactive solo exhibitions were in the Umetnostna galerija Maribor in 2002 and in the Galerija Murska Sobota and the Equrna in Ljubljana in 2003. They showed her artistic universe to be a fairytale world of soft, elegiac, and otherworldly undertones; the motifs that predominate are human bones, skulls, cypresses, and floating veils. The extensive iconographic tradition of vanitas vanitatum , of transience and futility, and above all the contemporary ubiquity of violence, documentary or graphically enacted, have made painted bones an exceedingly trite motif, deprived of its primary purpose - to shock and sober the spectator into reflecting on the shortness of human life. Death is no longer the Grim Reaper; more and more it is turning into an impersonal, anonymous industrial fact. The dimension of spiritual life and the desire for a completely personified death have been negated; this negation is expressed in the abandoned yearning for eternal life in the religious sense, which is replaced by an aspiration towards eternal youth and immortality in a totally physical sense. Šeruga eschews such ineffective monotony, endowing her skulls and bones with completely other cultural references, archaic and vastly divergent from the contemporary production of horror. At first sight the bones and skulls in Šeruga' paintings are deceptively reminiscent of relics, which in reality they are not, since the power of relics corresponded to that of sacred paintings or sculptures. Relics were effective in and by themselves with their inherent miraculous powers, while paintings and sculptures first had to be consecrated. Šeruga's paintings are closer in spirit to hunting civilizations, in which bones, and skulls in particular, carried a ritualistic value. They were believed to be the repositories of an animal's soul and life, and the Lord of Beasts would resurrect the animal by putting meat onto the bones; hence the practice of suspending skulls and long bones in trees. In the 1st Book of Moses we read that God created Adam from dirt, and Eve from Adam's rib. Also the cypress-tree silhouettes in Šeruga's paintings bear the connotations of the next world and of magic powers - cypress smoke was used for warding off disease, evil spirits, and all manner of magic spells. In ancient Rome , a cypress branch planted outside the door marked the ritual funerary boundary. The terror pervading Šeruga's paintings is not graphic, but metaphysical. It is not the horror of death; rather, it could be said to be the fear of cryonics. The artist endeavors to preserve or find a personal life and a personal death, with all the nuances of, and transitions between, the two categories. She yearns for that which is lacking in cryopreservation, where the frozen dead await in limbo for the invention of the necessary cure which will enable them to continue their physical existence in a completely altered environment. Await, that is, to be admitted into paradise, but a paradise of the moneyed and the mindless. The bones in Šeruga's paintings express the lust for life and pain that intertwine so fatefully in a life limited in time. Moreover, the painter wishes to express and passionately defend her extremely intimate world by related implications: if there be passion, let it be my passion, if there be pain, let it be my pain, and if there be death, let it be my death. Life should be a symptom of death and not the other way around. With their unusually curved and geometrically irregular edges, Šeruga's paintings look like stretched out, dried hides or skins. They are reminiscent of giant parchments, stretched and sewn onto metal frames. The painting is still conceived in the sense of Alberti's window, but with a particular aberration: the standard regular quadrangle format is distorted. Centripetal forces pull the four sides toward the centre of the painting, until the frame seems to melt. The canvas-skin itself speaks of the memory of the division of labor in agrarian societies. The frequent metaphorical allusions male painters make in private about what it takes to do a painting of course refer to the penis. Quite a few painters will also give equally metaphorical advice that, in order for a painting to be of good quality, one should masturbate on it with a brush until one's “eyes fall out.” This type of advice may sound banal indeed, but what it is really saying is that the act of painting is a simulation and in a certain sense also a real act of procreation, as well as that the blindness ostensibly resulting from it is primarily blindness to the facts of physics. Only such blindness, in the spirit of northern romanticism, opens up the view of the true spiritual quintessence of things. At the beginning of Western European culture there was the image of the blind Homer, and official Christianity has Saul, who is blinded by the divine light and has his sight restored when his inner eyes open and he becomes Paul. Jure Mikuz asserts that, on a Groddeckian level, a perfectly legitimate etymological comparison can be made between the Slovene colloquialism for brush penzel * and the word penis . Contrary to such artistic practice, which a large part of female critics see as blatantly macho and chauvinistic, Šeruga's transparent color applications, her practice of sewing the canvas onto the frames, and her paintings reminiscent of illustrations of personal fairytales, point out to this being principally the art of a woman. After 2005, bones and skulls become increasingly rare in Šeruga's paintings, floating freely in the air or hidden among floral patterns when they do appear, but no longer occupying the prominent position or having the dominant status as in her earlier works. Also the silhouettes of cypress trees gradually disappear from her paintings, to be replaced by bare trees, ornaments, ornamentally twisted ram horns, and transparent leaves with light shining through them, painted one on top of another. Šeruga continues to borrow the individual motifs of her paintings from various crucial works from art history and uses them to create new wholes in which these images acquire different lives and different meanings. Although in her post-2006 paintings there are no direct signifiers of the ever-present death, her works are suffused by an elegiac and otherworldly sentiment. The warped edges deform the pictorial plane. The canvas as an illuminated and reflective epidermis, reflecting our world and allowing glimpses of the world beyond. The artist makes a unified image from both worlds, with individual images upside down, as though seen through a camera obscura. Beyond the fairytale surface there appears, apart from the otherworldly undertone, the atmosphere of unease that has intensified since her use of canvas-skin as the picture plane. In his Vite , Giorgio Vasari writes about the eccentric sculptor and stuccoist Silvio Cosini (1495-1547), who - obsessed with magical spells - flayed the body of a hanged man and made himself a vest out of the skin, which he wore over his shirt. In 2007 Šeruga's paintings became densely covered with ornaments. These ornaments assume the role of apotropaic patterns. As such, they turn into snares in which demons are helplessly trapped and reduced to harmlessness. A demon will be so fascinated by the ornaments that his malevolence will be completely paralyzed. He will become caught in the pattern, and the person protected by the pattern will be safe. Such ornaments can also be read as tattoos of the painting. And the purpose of a tattoo is likewise not merely decorative but apotropaic as well: it protects the skin or the person it is a part of from evil spells. Ornaments turn into lace, lace into mountain peaks, islands, or treetops. The veils from Šeruga's early paintings transform into phantoms of translucent sheets covered in writing. Unlike the writing from left to right in the Western European tradition, the writing in these paintings is in mirror script. Already Leonardo da Vinci used mirror writing, and the purpose of such script was to encode what was written, making it illegible to all but the author. The door between the two worlds in Natalija Šeruga's paintings stands open, and the painter herself represents the intersection of the two worlds. The inner side of the canvas-skin becomes the interior of the painting, a dangerous crossover boundary, and a window through which one can communicate only by looking, while any transgression is forbidden. To keep the two worlds safe, they are protected by patterns of ornamental signs. Also the glass spheres or bubbles with vague face-like imprints can be understood as trick mirrors, glass balls, medals, or old coins - the obols placed inside a dead person's mouth in antiquity so that the deceased could pay the ferryman across the Styx. Also the mastless, oarless vessel forming a pattern indicates that the course is already set and calls to mind Charon's boat. The painter is definitely not trying to make an arch-painting, or an anthological painting of the 21st century, or a “painting of all paintings.” Her world may well seem fantastic and naïve, but for her it is above all the only world that can and must exist. Another thing to keep in mind is that this is a presentation of a sensitive reflection, searching for an artistic expression that will prove most suitable. Fairytale transforms into reality and back into fairytale, enriched by its experience of, and capability to discern, the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Robert Inhof * translator`s note: a loanword adapted from the German Pinsel.
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