Pratik : Pratik Spring Issue 2021 Art Special : Ira Marušič and Contemporary Painting

Ira Marušič and Contemporary Painting

by Andrej Medved

After the big story of Emerik Bernard, which reached a peak in the Eighties and Nineties, contemporary Slovene painting went into crisis, on both a personal level (few artists remained true to themselves and to the business of art) and a general one (due to the “incursion” of new media into national galleries). In spite of the rediscovery of the painting and “classical” artistic images in the USA and Europe, Slovene artists persisted with a quasi-painterly approach and exhibitions. A decisive exhibition was that offering a survey of the work of Živko Marušič in the Modern Gallery, entitled The painting is dead, long live the painting! (1998), which showed painting’s revitalisation. And it is precisely Živko Marušič who keeps surprising us with renewed artistic force and quality, and who is today one of the leading painters not only in Slovenia, but on a wider stage. Beside him stand Dušan Kirbiš and Marko Jakše with his phantasmagorical figures. In the new millennium there followed the discovery of new painting, an important return to the canvas. First with the “dream” images and classically marked metier of Mitja Ficko, and shortly after the painting wonder woven into the images of Joni Zakonjšek and Uroš Weinberger, which cleverly combine computer and social-existential iconography in temporal point zero, finally leading to a new wave of female painters who have returned trust in the message of painting and artistic realisation. Today, the most outstanding are Maruša Šuštar, Nika Zupančič, Suzana Brborović, Katja Pal, Barbara Drev, Nina Čelhar and Ira Marušič.

The canvases of Ira Marušič are marked not only by segments and fragments of images, but by their placement in the composition, the order, the construction, into a new rearrangement of what we already know. What is important is only the recognition of this new order and the final naming of this state. Then we shall grasp the meaning of the artist’s pleasure in the garden of Food, a closed garden of Eden. A moment’s inattention and we are already endlessly distant from realisation about the artistic work, from recognising art. Form is revealed, recognised, named. The same applies to the composition of her images. On the surface, carefully divided, disposed, but in reality we suddenly notice that we are – like Jonah from the Bible – in the belly of Marušič’s painting, that we are walking across its corpse, its head, limbs, backbone. That we are looking from the inside out… and in this is the garden of delight, the view from within the painter’s garden. We are within it, we feel each part of its body, we follow it in every direction, which now become places devoted to the Painting. Yes, it is disembodied, delayered, exteriorised – within Ira’s painting. In the new paintings of Ira Marušič, the method of decomposing reveals the inner body of painting; her painting.

Ira Marušič is not really interested in the simultaneity of artistic phenomena, although her paintings are always contemporary in some other way. Her canvases are aesthetically flawless; they are not characterised by strident colourism, but a Mediterranean sublimation of feeling and thought that are not only a reflection of artistic ideas and theories, but a movable, opaque colour plasma. The whole artistic screen is permeated by an endless peace; the moment is transformed into a sublime state, into a pure projection of paradise lost and found. Beauty and emphasised detail are evenly balanced and reawaken in the image, which represents a break with any kind of realism, although it is the artistic basis of these images that is the “pattern” for the creation of abstracted, original forms that are in principle imitative, mimetic.

A special feature of her artistic expression is an individual decision for creativity, in which clarity of theory is blurred and it is no longer possible to sublimate images to a specific aesthetic canon of previous artistic experience or to ideas outside the painting.

In her paintings, Marušič shows us (mostra, from mostrare)an artistic construct, which is a “network” that is not a construct in the pejorative sense, but is a demonstration, a display, a projection of something that in fact does not exist in the motif, in the proposal for an image, but comes into being in an original artistic fashion, which is both within and without, but still possible only in the special and personal artistic Language that now belongs only to her paintings. This intermediateness, where the transition from a completely banal motif to exceptional art arises, this inner leap from the almost mimetic level to the highest ethical-aesthetic level, this metamorphosis that facilitates the occurrence and birth of a new painting and a new style of painting, is (now) in reality a monstrum, that is an “artistic monster” as Sign: the highest Sign, which speaks from itself, the megasemeion of Ira’s depiction.

In her images there is something raised up, commended to our attention … floating in the ether… a barely perceived indeterminance in the resolution of the painted “figures” – food, of which the first part is a clear, pure, light, almost smooth surface, while the second disintegrates in the specific determinance of the selected object. And all around is gas, thick red or blue, in absence, in darkness… a substantial gas, “invisible, but present”, cosmic, universal, interplanetary. On the one hand is the ideal procreation of cleansed forms, almost mathematical beauty or harmony, and on the other the “leaning” towards colour, towards complete composition at the centre point of the picture.

Ira Marušič reconstructs (ur-)forms and a phantasm of a pre-modernist landscape through shaping an artistic language that does not replace realistic objects, but rather combines the artistic marker with an impulsive rhythm in the layering of paint. Her striking mental approach now once again combines each object, the whole artistic approach, with the subject, that is with the painter, and in so doing facilitates the clear connection of the painted images with nature. The melancholy in her works is still connected with the past, that is with the loss of landscape in modernism, and yet the artistic subject remains faithful to it, with no possibility that the situation will fundamentally change and be revolutionised. The psychological content of the painting is still filled with the hypertrophic past of the landscape, but it is given renewed meaning by the painter. This internalisation, this evasion alongside forgotten nature as a subject in contemporary postmodernist painting, is still somehow obvious, but the negativity – the deficit, the forgotten imitational painting procedures – is replaced by positive, postmodern romantic experience, which submits to emotional rhythm. The painter is shaping a style that bears signs of defeated melancholy, the traces of which are visible in previous pictures and are a kind of transmission or transfer of feelings into artistic images. These, then, are Ira’s landscapes, existential, intimate and emotional, with regard to which, as at the start of the century, empathy is important.

The best works are those that show the “inner text”, the basis of art as such, the inner body of painting and figurality, as an endless net that “lies in wait” for the definitions of forms, colours and space in order to “untangle” them into basic, intelligible elements. A kind of erosion of the paint layers of the whole surface into an indeterminate colourless mass, paint texture – a pictorial “text” – takes the place of the sacred body, so that it no longer acknowledges the external marker and painting is not supplemented by ideology, but rather the “spirit” of the artistic disposition in space prevails. Now the painting is no longer predetermined by meaning and content, but is “empty” and “erased”. Nevertheless, it still holds a kind of magnetism – and remanence – of the former allegorical and symbolic functions; it is still ritually woven.

The painting becomes a space of mental visions and rhythms; a space of widening chromatic texture to the edge and beyond. The whole surface of the canvas and the bearer is in reality a correlate of the figure: when diverse shapes, saturated with thick paint, burst from its body. Contraction squeezes the body from a structure to a figure, widening stretches it and diffuses it from a figure to a structure.

Ira’s “figures” are bodies without organs; that is to say, the depicted Figure or figurality is not subordinated to the organism, to a top-down system of “functioning”, from a single point that submits and determines and defines, but lives as a separate organ; original, prime; from all directions, within and without, mentally and bodily; the beginnings of a flexible, spasmodic and sensory being.

Translated from the Slovene by David Limon

Born in 1989 in Koper, Slovenian artist Ira Marušič studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where she graduated in 2012 with the thesis »Il cuorenell'arte e nella medicina« (The Heart in Art and Medicine) with professors Carlo Di Raco and Elena Ribero as mentors. She continued her postgraduate study in Venice and in 2015 obtained a Master's Degree in painting under the guidance of professors, Carlo Di Raco and Aldo Grazzi, with the thesis »Il tempo e l'arte« (Time and Art).