BLAŽKA KRIŽAN: A WALK BETWEEN THE SHADOWS |
The Herman Pečarič Gallery Piran | 25 August – 30 October 2023 |
Opening: Friday, August 25, 2023, at 8:00 pm |
Curated by: Nives Marvin
Meander III, 2023, paper cutting art, acrylic, 117 x 97,5 x 1 cm
Meander II, 2023, paper cutting art, acrylic, 117 x 67,5 x 1 cm
“In the work of Blažka Križan, we reveal visual experimentation with an emphasis on the dimension of perception and the dynamics of the image. Here we observe the influence of optical art and gestalt research, which characterized the period of modernism in Southeastern Europe. The work oscillates between art and design, highlighting the extraordinary effect of fluidity, movement determined by the choice of a monochrome material.” is the explanation written by the international expert jury of the 57th International Painting Ex-tempore Piran for the work The Flows. The author, recipient of the Young Author Prize, is Blažka Križan (1990, Ptuj), who graduated at the Department of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana in 2012 and completed her master's studies there in 2017. So far, she has received several awards: an award for her master's thesis, the Prešeren Student Award, the 2018 Primavera DLUM Award (Society of Fine Artists Maribor), the 2020 DLUM Award and last year the already mentioned Youth Author Prize.
Already during her studies, the author researched the material properties of paper and painting surfaces in particular, and already experimented with the unconventional technique of carving into them, which is still her constant today. With a respectful attitude towards matter, she thus developed an at first glance minimalist expression, defined by consistently pre-planned strings of lines and signs, which allows the viewer to discover countless vibrating and pulsating patterns and hidden contents, which they can interpret and experience in their own way. The author chooses the simplest signs with extreme forethought and precision, but ones which allow associations to archetypal and organic forms and phenomena in nature, for example to elementary geometric shapes or to waves, circulation, to constant change. For her, these are clearly a persistent theme, that she has never definitively expressed, as she repeats them again and again and assembles them into new complex sequences, and they become the main builders of a carefully thought-out, but always elegantly executed compositional arrangement. In addition to the seemingly chromatically minimalist, but sophisticatedly felt black and white images, attention is drawn to the works, which the author enhances with a carefully selected gentle color value and more intensively emphasized and highly transparent shades. The dynamics of movement, sequences of flickering forms and discretely defined spatial illusions provoke the viewer's eye to stop at each cut and at the same time to experience the surface of the carving as a whole.
Blažka Križan is a young author who, in her own way, confronts the parallel and intangible digital world with her demanding creations of the manually produced and minutely executed filigree works. It is as if the carvings are her intimate visual comments on the fast pace of everyday life imbued with modern technologies, its brevity and transience. She replaces the traditional painting tools, brush or pencil, with a scalpel, with which, through a long process of consistent and precise perforation of the paper surface, she creates repetitive and aesthetically impressive forms. They are seemingly abstract and only in segments resemble natural forms, and at the same time they are inviting with effectively felt movement and the dynamics of changing their sequences. Her willful perfectionism in her manual skills is very noticeable: she carves black and white or wavy lines defined with acrylics with maximum precision and lines them one next to the other, also in such a way as to establish a third dimension and thus to allow the passage of light. Therefore, she complements the surface with relief structures, with which she achieves the mysterious haptic effect of the painting and also emphasizes her research zeal for the optical effects of illuminated and shaded fragments, which is also associated with the name of the exhibition A Walk Between the Shadows. Despite the possible connections of Blažka's images with the experiences of optical illusions of the historical op art, her creativity remains modern and current with its innovative implementation of the multiplication of one simple sign / notch and with a discreet symbolic confessional connotation.
Nives Marvin
