The third big series of the paintings of Ksenija Čerče is on view in Nova Gorica for the first time. She presented Hortus Conclusus in Galerija Equrna seven years ago (2002) and it was already evident at that time that the artist wilfully tackles the question of beauty in artistic work. Yet here the lure of the paintings to draw the viewers gaze is not made possible through Kant's notion of 'disinterested gaze' but for the reason of seducing the viewer into a trap: disarmed by the attractive power of the surface, the viewer suddenly comprehends what is hidden beneath.

We are going to approach the exhibition Not Yet Untitled with the help of the artist's description of the painting techniques through which process the paintings were made. Works in techniques which the artist named "audible techniques" create a bridge between the series Paintings that are Heard (2006), the attempt at synaesthetic performance of sounds in colours, and more recent works. Library of Voices (2006-2008) and Ear of the Mind (2008-2009) are this kind of painting.

The majority of the works in the exhibition started with a technique which the artist calls "no technique". The technique by which the painting is made is usually a premise interesting only to experts. The artist stimulates the viewer to ponder the origin of the painting by the choice of title; an obvious paradox between what we see and what the premise proposes with the declaration that it is without technique, that the painting originates from "no technique". A painting which supposedly started with "no technique" obviously conceals the process of its origin. With the cancellation of a term for the painting technique this field is empty and therefore open to numerous possibilities. A work with the gesture of cancellation of its technique points to a process of formation.

The current of formative paintings which we cannot call simply painting anymore has a special meaning in the opus of Ksenija Čerče. During the process of planning, her painting links with numerous artistic media of which traces are visible in exhibited works: the artist uses video, photography, installation and performance within the act of painting, and connects painting with conceptual art, land art, body art and the processes of appropriation. It is important that her paintings are not objects but the physical realisation of unusual processes.

The painting Ballad of the Vacuum (2008-2009) is by content seemingly built from two key layers. First, the image of three patterned bulbs which drop down through the atrium architecture draws the eye. The other imagery layer of abstract spots, which is also formed by the painting base, is under the layer of mimetic image. At first sight this is a play upon the image reminiscent of Polke, yet the process of origin points to a more complicated structure. The artist first created a painting base from kitchen towels. She embroidered coloured spots into them which have the effect of an image from a computer screen. Then she covered certain parts of the base with the colour shades of heterogeneous greyness which she got from researching mature human hair. Onto this grounding she painted the outline of architecture from the pattern of an old photograph which she kept in a diary. Finally she painted images of three objects which she had created by herself.

Also some objects are offered to the viewer resulting from the process of origination of a painting – the embodiment of the artistic work which is in the exhibition Not Yet Untitled. These, most visible in the Eye of the Mind (2008-2009), take the place of the painting itself in places, and show the work in its absence. The bulbs which are represented in the Ballad of the Vacuum are also this kind of object. Due to the connection with other painting layers they acquire meanings in the painting which the object itself did not have.

The layering of images in the painting of Ksenija Čerče places it within the framework of art which researches the visuality of contemporary times. The themes are, besides the researching of the history of art, feminist engagements and the painting analyses of colour, form, texture and translucence, a constant in the artist's opus. Researching the visual within contemporaneity is not only connected to the research of the sense of images, but it reaches also into the fields of society, culture, politics and law.

Ksenija Čerče's works offer a final deconstruction of the image, in which even the painted copy of an already existent motif is changed into an abstract matrix without an origin. An original does not exist anymore, the denotation is effaced, we live in a world of numerous indicators. But her paintings do not speak only of the loss of a primary image. They are not just the play of copies, but they construct an image anew. A copy which is not a copy anymore, since the original does not exist or it is already a copy by itself, through the creative gesture offers an option for the origination of a new form, a new original. With this gesture – it can be seen in the way which bulbs and architecture, shades of grey hair and pink embroidered parts of some already existing image join into the new whole on the surface – Ksenija Čerče's paintings renounce the safe position of subversive cynicism of which it seems to be one of the basic and at the same time the most ethical and politically questionable drives of contemporary art. These are not frustrated paintings which show disappointment with the ethical and social values of society. The paintings of Ksenija Čerče build new forms on the ruins of the copied world and in the apparent void, with a lasting gaze, find fulfilment.

Petja Grafenauer

Portrait photo: Matjaž Wenzel