OBSERVATORY

Suzana Brborović is showcasing her recently created series of large and medium format paintings at the Nova Gorica City Gallery. Having been included in many of the gallery’s group exhibitions over the years, she is exhibiting solo for the first time here, presenting works she created between 2020 and 2022. At their core, the works impeccably retain the artist’s signature structuralist architectural elements, accentuated geometry, and the construction of images by the removal of carefully stratified layers. In this sense, the placement of the paintings into the separate, oval exhibition space represents a remarkable contrast between the seemingly ill-suited layout of the gallery and the undisputed strictness and linearity of the paintings, which primarily exude precision, sharpness, discipline, and structure. And yet, the ostensible disparity dovetails with the appearance of the new works, which mark a turning point in the artist’s practice, reflected in the not insubstantial changes in both form and content. One might even be tempted to say that the gallery in Nova Gorica, whose shape and arch are reminiscent of either an orbit, an observatory, or the hallway of a spacecraft, is just the right kind of appealing and suitable space for the artist’s new series, which is firmly upward looking and focused on the sky.

Observatory delivers works whose central theme is gazing into the expanse, into the sky and the universe. In tandem with changes in the artist’s life, and driven by the desire to alter how she works, this very expansive and infrequently unfathomable premise manifests itself in artistic experimentation, bold playfulness, and an indulgent sense of relaxation. Even though the new visual desires and transformation of content are not very obvious or immediately recognisable in the newly created works, they evince a sense of airiness, implied imaginary content, a fantastic dystopia, and dreamy apparitions. Among the most obvious novelties are fantastic images of the night sky characterised by a mystical darkness and overlapping textures and hues of deep blacks. They are joined by crisp shots of telescopic and astronomic photographs intertwined and visually supported by geometric grids in lighter colours that cunningly blur the boundary between humankind’s technological inventions and the transcendental phenomena of physics. Intentionally less suggestive and consequently less obvious are the references to specific premises from literature or art history, which are either embodied in the paintings as forms, colour palettes, or artistry, or that dictate the vibe, ambient, and often quite literally the atmosphere. In this sense, the established architectural and historical study of structures has been replaced by specific interests and reflections on a vague yet extraordinarily potent future.

Brborović’s departure from her seemingly established artistic practice is revealed in the exhibition as a dynamic relationship between organic novelties and inherited mainstays. Sometimes she remains faithful to the past, at other times, glancing into the future, she shatters the boundaries of her own comfort and habits. The principal attributes, such as geometric structures, lines, and architecture, remain, but they take on playful, even laid back, characteristics. The artwork becomes less graphic, more abstract, and more relaxed. For example, we are once again faced with the artist’s much beloved hexagons, an exceptionally versatile and firm polygon that recalls not just honeycombs, progressive urban planning, and the antenna domes of Berlin, but also geodesic glamping or rave domes, the hotel carpet from the most well-known film based on a Stephen King novel, or the popular board game Settlers of Catan. In the paintings, the hexagons are illustrated as some sort of composite screens that provide a personalised glance into the sky akin to the principle used in The Truman Show. While in her previous series the artist, for example, evoked abandoned ruins and remnants of German industrialisation, in her new works she leans more substantially on technological progress and science fiction, a genre characterised by objects, infrastructure, and technology related to space that not only raise the issue of one’s own existence and perception of the universe, but also disclose the enigmatic crossroads between technological utopia and fatal perdition.

The first time one sees the paintings, critique and morbidity seem more like a remote than truly imminent suggestion. The works initially come across as undemanding and meek, their main virtue being their visual impact and an undeniable focus on painting as the medium. The original goal of creating aesthetically interesting paintings in which the artist compensates for the perplexing substance and story with the use of specific colours, forms, and a sense of levitation is materialised in images that astonish with impeccable technical delivery, visually arresting composition, and the ability to elicit absurd references. One such painting is Imagine a Tree, whose selected colour palette, positioning of elements, and composition appear like an offshoot of vaporwave, a micro genre popularised online that has an idiosyncratic visual aesthetic. A genre originating in the 2000s, it is characterised by repetitive elements of palm-lined avenues, a grid or road stretching into the horizon, sunsets, towering skyscrapers, fragments of famous ancient statues, the windows and logos of well-known software, clouds, and implied parts of technological devices or modes of transportation. All of this is suffused with a combination of violet, pink, orange, and turquoise hues, overlaid by a neon filter and a distinct grid or chessboard structure. Inherent in this subculture genre

Three bodies 2021, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 120 cm is a content norm that satirically highlights the ambivalent coexistence of nostalgia, popular culture, and technology, with a pinch of consumerism, advertising, and capitalism thrown in for good measure. Out of all this, Brborović’s paintings reflect at a minimum ambivalence and prevalent chaos, which slot together into a sensible, aesthetically self-satisfied whole on canvas. Elements such as colourful clouds, hints of sunsets, and echoes of the classic 1990s software Paint do appear in some other paintings as well, but in visual terms they are primary to the artist’s style and artistic genesis, leaving the viewer deliberately unencumbered by content.

An interpretation of the effects of paintings on the spectator and their impact on the exhibition space that does the paintings justice is an exception rather than the rule despite the power of the written word. What some say is probably true – that no matter how complex the description and how excellent the reproduction, they are a disservice to the actual paintings. Seeing these paintings in person provides a unique experience of threedimensionality as one perceives all the textures, colours, minute details, contours, and different thicknesses of the layers of paint. In real life and in their tangibility, the paintings look different, much more demanding, and much more impressive. Some of the works appear as if five more works are concealed beneath the surface of the visible. This is because the author constructs the painting using a very complex method involving the deliberate layering of paint, and use of adhesive tape, software, collage, cut-outs, and projections. The material on the canvas, which she intentionally makes as complicated and bulky as possible, is then gradually removed so that the layers of the image are peeled off in reverse order. Using indispensable tools such as adhesive tape and sharp blades, she creates very precise, technically delicate paintings in a procedure that is protracted, laborious, and demands a significant measure of focus, vision, and determination. This procedure often results in subsequent visual discoveries and surprises, creating new dialogues between layers that demand additional adaptation, and especially time, because the paintings are impeccable and balanced. An individual painting can take many years to create, and during this process of refinement some works may deteriorate and degenerate. It is no surprise, then, that given the changes in the artist’s work conditions and her desire to increase her output, she has made decisions that satisfy the need for a fresh approach and a slight reduction in her workload. Clear shifts towards freer, more relaxed, and abstract strokes were already apparent in the series Doodles, which she presented at Ljubljana’s Škuc Gallery at the end of 2020. This series, which one might say was created in co-production with a one-year-old child, transformed the artist’s method of work and allowed her to be more playful, relaxed, and less sadistic even. And it is a mixture of the two approaches that has resulted in the current exhibition, a showcase that embodies just the right relationship between the disorderly and the structured.

It is no secret that Brborović’s paintings, well established and widely recognised on the visual arts scene, have always demanded a bit more attention and concentration from the spectator. They are so intense in their embodiment and in how they address spatial issues that they will pique the interest of the stern engineer and the dreamy freethinker alike. Observatory blends the artist’s controlled gaze, changing fascinations, and mixing of visual approaches. It serves up an intimate collage of urban planning, geometry, popular culture, internalised aesthetics, award-winning architectural designs, and the vastness of the universe. The latter two ideas in particular form the core of the exhibition: we often make sense of our own being and understanding through spatial dimensions and architecture, and the other thing we do this through is the cursed universe, which remains an indisputable inspiration even as it inspires unbearable fear and paranoia. Suzana Brborović aptly juggles both. Her paintings bring to life the inexplicable contrast between order, calculability, and precision, and the not insignificant chaos, fluidity, changeability, and unfathomability of space. Gazing at the sky – which is ironically a gaze into the past – is thus a cunning metaphor for a deliberately used discrepancy that appears in the works as an abstruse trick misleading us into not knowing whether we are looking at a fantastic future or a concealed present.

Maša Žekš

All dogs go to heaven 2021, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 170 x 140 cm

Imagine a tree

2021, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 170 cm

Repetition

2021, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 180 cm

Chaotic era

2022, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 170 x 280 cm

Cotton candy

A cloud in the night sky 2020, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 140 cm

Space train

2021, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 190 cm

The floor is lava

2020, akril na platnu / acrylic on canvas, 140 x 280 cm