Maruša Šuštar graduated in 2006 from prof. Jeraj won at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where in 2016 I also completed a master’s degree in painting with prof. Gustav Gnamuš and Assoc. Marjan Gumilar. Since 2009 I have had several solo exhibitions in Slovenia, Austria and Croatia. I also participated in a number of review exhibitions of contemporary Slovenian art, including We Want to Be Free, such as Fathers at the International Center of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (2010), Contemporary Slovenian Painting at Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana and Piran City Gallery (2014), Magic of Art - Protagonists of Slovene Contemporary Art 1968-2013 in Villa Manin in Passarian (2014), Vienna (2015) and Zagreb (2015), at the exhibition Pogled 8 - View of Slovene painting at home and around the world (2016), especially valid mention should also be made of the comprehensive exhibition of recent Slovene painting Time Without Innocence at the Modern Gallery in Ljubljana. I received the ESSL art award CEE 2009 - a special invitation from the Vienna Insurance Group, and in 2014 the first ART MUSE award for painting work. As a freelance artist, I live and work in Srednja vas in Bohinj.
Maruša Šuštar has a master’s degree in painting that she completed with Prof. Gustav Gnamuš at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In her painting, she touches on contemporary themes that emerge in today’s world through the presence of the media, the Internet, new technologies and ways of living in different environments across the planet. Thus, in her paintings, we can observe hints of refugee issues, brain drain, control, geopolitical shifts, the issues of cultural identity and the like. Moreover, these themes are repeatedly placed in the context of the so-called “eternal issues” that people have been dealing with since ancient times and that accompany us virtually everywhere and all the time (who are we, where are we going, why are we here, what is the point of our existence? etc.).
Thus, Maruša Šuštar’s paintings reveal and shed light on the manner in which post/modern communication takes place in nowadays society. It is as though the painter provides us with an insight into certain layers of ancient, long-forgotten and also newly awakened ancient cults, the Earth and remnants of cultures through a completely abstracted and mathematically precise matrix, which we utilise in everyday life through global positioning system navigation, high-tech media channels, the World Wide Web and other platforms. And with this reference, she would clearly show the essential inability of any human being, despite the high-end technology and progress that we produce ourselves, to be able to transform into a robotic and precise thinking machine, in which errors are minimised and things in their rational core become interconnected etc. – without the remnants of emotional knots and ties at the level of human self-examination that cannot be disentangled, let alone at the level of mutual complications and encounters. In this way, within this terribly precise network of technological order and determination, we feel human illogical, random and sometimes completely meaningless transitions, signs, etc. In addition, we see an unrequited desire to connect with the strata of the Earth, gusts of wind in deserted corners of the world, in the figures we see during our searching endeavours, ramblings and forlornness in these intertwinings of innumerable possibilities and layers, our attachment to some atavistic, never-resolved destiny.
If painting often liked to turn to nature and the beauty of the landscape in order to escape from the hardships of social shifts, to point to the eternity of natural principles or simply to look for an idealised image of the world, Maruša Šuštar’s landscape is like an immersion in dramatic goings-on, which could also have resulted in the tragic fate of all the characters in her paintings ... including us who gaze upon all this from some distant point, a satellite circumnavigating the planet, etc.
Her sophisticated aesthetics, through which this dramatic content takes place, stir a special tension in the spectator, since it is not like any aesthetic coding that we are used to from contemporary artists. We rather feel a certain continuous and substantial connection that goes back far beyond the bounds of modernism and its proto-modernistic beginnings – in a way, almost to cave painting. And at the same time, like some Aldous Huxley or Michel Houellebecq, through this ancient world of folktale, story or mythology, she introduces us to post-cataclysmic visions, a lack of homeliness, to paranoia and the supervision of the future.
And the more Maruša Šuštar distances us through her imagery, the closer she brings us to something we are reluctant to think of ...
JIRI KOČICA, introductory text for the exhibition Mind-escapees (Umobežniki) at the National Institute of Chemistry in Ljubljana, 2017
More reviews by art criticsRÉSUMÉ
Maruša Šuštar was born on April 6th 1977 in Kranj. In 2006, she graduated in painting with Prof. Zmago Jeraj at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, where she continued her postgraduate studies in painting with Prof. Gustav Gnamuš, which she successfully completed in 2016 with a master’s degree with Prof. Marjan Gumilar. Since 2010, she has had the status of an independent cultural worker. She works and lives in Srednja vas in Bohinj.
The painting scenes of Maruša Šuštar are established on the cusp between landscape and figures, as well as by mapping their interdependent relationship, where the abstract and the concrete shift are in effect. Her art of painting demands a special approach. The figures that grow within vast landscapes seem like points on a map, subject to distance, which belongs to the spectator but at the same time acts on the outside.
The portrayed scenes are geographically precisely determined, sometimes even cartographically evident, because they are defined by regions, countries, towns, roads or streets. The painting proposals are very concrete, although their starting points in the final image are abstracted and remodelled by the materiality of coloured masses. The artist finds them among photographs and satellite images, mostly taken from the Google Earth Server or from National Geographic documentary news, as well as from her own footage. It is mostly about the readymade elements that have played an important role intentionally, conceptually and during the process of painting after modernism. The directness of viewing has been replaced by “an intermediate” or a model image – an already encoded translation of the view. At the same time, through technological interference, the world becomes more transparent and accessible.
For Maruša Šuštar, using painting proposals is an obvious painting tool on the one hand and a conotated semantic marker on the other. Readymade images are like items of information to the painter, which enable the accessibility of an unusual view: the artist chooses elevated points of view, which are the least familiar, considering the everyday frontal observation of the world. The choice of a cadre involves interspace because it creates a distant perspective, from which the world seems like an anthill and the figures like stains within the cinemascopic expansion. The visual field suggests the view, which is accompanying and present at all times, regardless of our knowledge and vigilance. This is a view that embraces the many perspectives of the present bodies and one angle with an overview of the crowd. Such a perspective seems above the human, but it is dehumanised and desubjectivised – the unseen point of view of some generalised supremacy. The distance lies in the universal visibility that is foreign and unnatural in precluding all the covers that combine the everyday experience of watching. In the context of a supervised, uncovered and impersonal modern society, this is the most suitable panoptic scheme. Michel Foucault1 defined panopticism as a “pure architect or optic system”, based on implanting bodies in space in terms of hierarchical organization and the relationships of power. It is essential that all bodies are subordinate to the field of visibility. [1] The individual is seen, but cannot see themselves; „he is the subject of information, never the subject in communication“. [2]
In Maruša Šuštar‘s painting, there is a consciousness about commanding relationships that are explicitly present within the globalised world. Frequently, the photographic image proposals represent shots of crisis areas and geographic targets of the new West colonialism (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Israel). It is interesting that the pictures used in New York are different in composition and mood from the rest. The New York images express a dark and soulless atmosphere, resulting from a smothered, even-toned colour scale and a geometrical urban network, which acts as a chessboard for moving the pieces and for realising the organizational disciplinary mechanism of modern society. But in this art New York represents a symbolical place of entrapment and it is more of an exception than a rule. Although the point of view always implicates an overview, the compositions of these vast landscapes usually do not fully correspond to the architect figure of the Panopticon. Factography is transformed and overflows the painting facture in such way that the landscapes gradually lose any point of actual, concrete reference space. The painting intervention and photography proposal pass each other and transform their own territories. The view vanishes and blends in with the background. It seems as if the artist is interested in the geophysical and geographical features of the depicted places – their scenery, instead of the geopolitics and political mapping of the land. In the last paintings especially, the locations are more and more (politically) neutral and selected mostly because of their geographic specifications. She is attracted by them and searches them in these images. They all have a desolation, a wide emptiness and a kind of initially undistinguished landscape in common.
Maruša Šuštar makes the landscape surface into the material grounding for the picture. The painting facture is in spite of the autonomous moving of the design mass and collecting colour stains – not as an abstract field, but with a micro-structure resulting from naturalistic grounding. The topography is expressed through pictographic elements. It is not unusual for an artist to be fascinated with old maps, which are sometimes included in her paintings. On old maps, decorative and pictographic elements have played an important role in presenting the Earth, though that role was later left to utilitarian symbols that had more to do with measurements and distances than with the landscape of that area. [3] The artist pays considerable attention to the corporality of the painting: balancing differently densities and worked colour masses, the alternating trace of spade and brush, spontaneous dropping and intentional stains all create chaotic matter and a lively facture – a sensually experienced surface of the painting that demonstrates the sensitivity of the Earth’s surface. Optical tactility in detecting these images, where the optics of the eye act as a touching organ, craves the magical makeover of the view into a form of touch and a means of connection. The artist’s wish to discover the primaeval Earth and its domestication is seen in the haptic texture. To delineate the landscape means that you have experienced it and belong to it.
The shaping of the surface and the landscape is the primary aspect of these paintings. Only hereon does the earth become available for mapping, netting and drawing – and then fragments of maps, ground plans, architectural drawings, figures, inscriptions and signs appear above it and civilise the landscape with their reminiscences. But basically, these landscapes are designed as products of natural forces and random configurations, which are independent of the disciplined geometry of the Panopticon and the instrumentalised organization of human life. But there is nothing romantic about them. Moreover, they function as metaphysical, apocalyptic visions above human will and power, where the only possible subordination is the power of nature and fragility of life.
Figures within these expanses function as anchorage. At a close look, you can see that they are like stains creating distance and difference to the field in which they are placed. They are displayed in seemingly random groups, which fall into individuals that are rather perceived as members of the species. The typical distant angle of sight and anonymity, which compels us to approach the figure mentally in order to discover what it is doing, reminding us of the scenes of the Spanish painter Juan Genovese. His paintings have an image of violence, oppression and terrorism in the background. With Maruša Šuštar, we do not have that impression of the crowd‘s collective effect, but an impression of a group of scattered and displaced points of view. Her protagonists excite us with a feeling of inactivity. They appear on the scene as observers that indicate the expiration of an event or express a premonition that stays outside the field. Their movement in the space seems lost, without an obvious cause or defined action. The longer we watch them, the more it appears that only existence is portrayed.
Nadja Gnamuš
1. Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison, Ljubljana: Krtina, 2004, pp. 222, 225.
2. Ibid, p. 220.
3. Edward S. Casey, »Prologue: Mapping It Out with/in the Earth«, in: Earth-Mapping. Artists Reshaping Landscape, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
In examining the paintings of Maruša Šuštar, one could speak about a special ‘figurativeness’ that she has introduced into the art of painting; and about ‘focalisations’, ‘reductions’, about a special expressiveness that characterises certain periods. Another significant aspect is the ‘mannerism’ and ‘disproportionality’ of depicted figures; the role of the ‘background’ – in other words, the role-and-significance of space – ‘the emergence of space’ – in her paintings. We shall speak of this in more detail elsewhere. For now, we are concerned with the scheme of gazing, the gaze that the painter introduces into her works. Depiction as a function of the picture in relation to the gaze, where one can speak of the so-called scopic drive, when our gaze, according to Lacan, is “the object, subconsciously or consciously forgotten, yet perpetually returning as a pulsatile field; as a fluid mechanism… What is painting? It is obviously not for nothing that we have referred to a picture as to the function where the subject has to search for itself as such. But what is happening when a human subject is engaged in making a picture of himself, in putting into operation that something that has in its centre the gaze? We are told by some that in a picture, the artist wishes to be the subject, and the art of painting is to be distinguished from all others by the artist intending to impose themself on us in their work, as the subject, as the gaze.”
Subject, painter: Maruša Šuštar inscribes herself into a painting as the gaze: as the view-from-above that was introduced into fiction by N. Sarraute:
“They were sprouting from everywhere, as if germinating in the clammy tepidity of air, and dripping slightly, as if leaking from the walls, from fenced trees, from benches, from gritty sidewalks, from squares. They crept in long dark clusters along the dead facades of houses. Here and there, in front of the store windows, they would thicken into more coagulated, immobile clods that were making whirls like those of slight plugs. They radiated a desperate serenity, a vacant complacency. They closely examined the sheet piles in the white Laundry, which skilfully imitated snow-covered hills, and doll whose eyes and teeth steadily switched on and off, on and off, on and off, continually switched on and then switched off again at equal intervals. They watched for a long time, not moving forward, standing absorbed in front of the window and constantly deferring the moment of departure until the next interval. Tired of looking and inattentive, the good little children, whose hands they were holding, waited patiently by their side.” (Tropisms, 1957) /Tropizmi, 1957/
Under the gaze, a painting is a stain, a ‘macchia’ that is correlative with gaze and thus a ‘freak’, a ‘monstre’, archaically speaking, a sign that, according to S. Žižek, “embodies the unbearable truth about me”. Is (this) truth really unbearable? Psychoanalysis fails here, it miscarries. In ‘truth’, Maruša’s images convey gaiety and joy; a joy not unlike the one described by H. Matisse: “What I am after, above all, is expression. Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that all the same my ambition is limited, and does not go beyond the purely visual satisfaction such as can be obtained from looking at a picture. But the thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means, which must be more complete (and by complete I do not mean complicated) the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it.
Expression, for me, does not reside in passions glowing in a human face or manifested by violent movement. The entire arrangement of my picture is expressive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his feelings. In a picture, every part will be visible and will play its appointed role, whether it be principal or secondary. Everything that is not useful in the picture is, it follows, harmful. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety: any superfluous detail would replace some other essential detail in the mind of the spectator.
I want to reach that state of condensation of sensation which makes a painting. I might be satisfied with a work done at one sitting, but I would soon tire of it, therefore, I prefer to rework it so that later I may recognize it as representative of my state of mind. There was a time when I never left my paintings hanging on the wall because they reminded me of moments of over-excitement and I did not like to see them again when I was calm. Nowadays I try to put serenity into my pictures and rework them as long as I have not succeeded.” (Notes of a Painter)
From the artist, such a painter’s view demands a special understanding of space: a space that actually does not exist. Where all depicted figures seem to float, as if suspended in vacuity, in whiteness, in the spacelessness of a picture. The painting is in ‘the emergence of space’, maintained by special artistic structures – the structure of a ‘curtailed’ stroke, a grid of artistic elements that now represent a basis, a base, a foundation, a background withstanding the pictorial surface. The space of these pictures is imaginative, imaginary, merely a property of the pictorial screen from the ‘white’ period until the present day. A borderline space is ‘at work’ in these paintings, a space where one is falling, is suspended, is floating: like a sublimation of bodies and swimming in whiteness and an angel, a dance, a reflection and a star, a smoky curtain… It all reflects the fundamental primary trace (in the sense of Derrida’s definitions), which is timeless and devoid of a real space, and thus the traces of artistic introspection that withstands / holds the painter’s phantasm only as an artistic product; only as a so-called ‘work of art’.
The view in Maruša Šuštar’s paintings is the inner projection into the vast abysses of the picture and the art of painting, which nevertheless does not depict – represent – something that is essentially absent, latent, subdued in the unconscious… The painter is faithful to the pictorial screen as a vehicle for communicating special and original visions without the borderline examination of the foundations of painting. Everything happens in the selected frame of an allegory, which it suits entirely and fully. The painter no longer searches for the ‘painting of paintings’ but stages an idiosyncratic narrative force of figurative artistic relations in many, many canvases.
The perspective in the paintings by Maruša Šuštar raises a number of issues that are not readily resolvable. One forms the impression that the plane of the painting is developed in the foreground in the absence of a horizon that would determine the represented paysage and, moreover, the figures that find their way into each painting are disproportionally folded into themselves, ‘bent’ or ‘multiplied’, which invests the pictures with a special aesthetic quality. Everything happens on the flat surface, in an ‘absorbed veil’… Though not revolutionary in terms of composition, the picture nevertheless introduces a series of new artistic approaches to figurative arrangement, which makes Šuštar a modernistic painter. Her figurativeness presents a special ‘investigative field’ or champs d’investigation that has not been addressed in Slovenian fine art before; a field where the artistic and not the mimetic approach is relevant. Priority is given to the moment de l’artiste and not the moment de la nature, although a sense of plein-air painting is pervasive. The creative permutation in the treatment of figures is foregrounded – a permutation related to the conscious decision of the painter to consider the painting as a screen on which she has free rein to play with the figure and its ‘distortions’. And yet the figure arises from an image as an equivalent element, the pictorial system of painting is preordained; undetermined by a figurative scheme, the gaze travels from the bottom upwards and vice versa. It is defined by a subjective view that no longer allows for traditional gazing.
The painter’s ‘modernism’ is especially explicit when it comes to the understanding of the figure, in figurative disproportion when one might speak of the divided and reunited body of the painting within an autonomous artistic structure. The ‘twists’, turns and ‘jumps’ of figurative elements – of group and partial arrangements – are only readable in the enclosed field of some metaphorical phantasm. An established artistic discourse cannot capture this new, pure element of perspective that compels the beholder to reconsider and alter this gaze. The pictorial subject is not illusionistic; instead, its landscape is levelled with the flat surface, the gaze blending with the plane into a subjective mass that covers the painting in its entirety. Hence, what we encounter is the pure subjectivity of painting and of gaze, an assimilation of the eye into the painting. Quoting Matisse, one could nevertheless say that what he is “interested in is not nature morte or paysage, but the figure that allows him to most efficiently express a virtually religious sense of living” (1908, Grande revue). A painting is the direct translation of emotions and unconscious states of mind into an image. Human figures in these canvases are never painted in the exterior; instead, one forms the impression that the entire scene is being played out in some bright interior. This is due to the intimacy of painting, however. The figures are disproportional, but only because they are not being depicted mimetically, in nature. Maruša paints pictures, not nature. In this sense, the pictorial perspective is utterly ‘rigorous’, although it appears that these are mere excerpts, ‘partial’ picturings that could have just as well been arranged otherwise
The distinctive pictorial idiom and ‘corporeality’ constitute a representative structure that foregrounds a signified image, its phantasm, its insatiable lust for life, for pulsating in the painting’s material space. What is required is the erotic drive, which the painter discovers in each new work. The interpretation and the gaze sliding along the painting can contain nothing rational. This painting divulges an explicit creative method, un progetto dolce, which is a product of the painter’s imagination, devoid of the expressive rhetoric to which works of this kind can quickly yield. Here, the only thing of significance is the personal cultural universe and the arte-arte dialogue. The painter, therefore, does not construct her visions in other relationships: art-nature or even art-idea-ideology, and even less so in relation to society. What is important is not the artist’s position on the objective and visible reality but the artistic vision. Maruša Šuštar does not acknowledge dissimilarity or the distance to the painted space; quite the contrary, she only recognizes the phantasm, which impels the artist to engage in an extreme, intimistic coalescence, a nonpareil identification. The reality of a work will not be found outside this association, beyond the conscious loyalty to the metier of a painter. The self-presence of a painting and a painter in relation to ‘inner experience’ is the principal aspect of artistic co-existence.
Contemporary Slovenian Painting, First Generations of the 3rd Millennium, Andrej Medved
At the exhibition of the same name in Cankarjev dom in Ljubljana, March 2014
Simulaker Gallery, Novo mesto, 5 April – 26 April 2012, preface
Due to the strong measure of freshness and persuasive nature of her fine art, Maruša Šuštar has achieved an exceptional level of recognition in recent years among creators of her generation. She belongs to a rather scant circle of contemporary artists who swear by classical art techniques; her research into the painting medium contributed to the gradual development of her own idiosyncratic and original artistic poetics. Indeed, her works are marked by a unique structure of the picture plane: the author’s canvasses are characterised by a consistent use of perspective, which is directed from above to the surface of the earth. This type of disposition allows the author to set up a distant view that, due to the elements used, does not obscure its affinities with classic cartography or certain popular digital tools, such as Google Earth. In this way, the author achieves a meaningful alienation effect: what is apparent cannot be the result of viewing from the human perspective – it is rather a view from an optical device that hovers over the landscape like an all-seeing technological eye and documenting its reality. The view is becoming dehumanized and unnatural, but this allows greater visibility and transparency. It is this all-seeing feature that brings to the fore the aspect of (social) control, which has remained a substantive constant of the author’s painting in recent years.
The landscapes are inhabited by solitary loiterers (on some canvasses, they unite to form a crowd) who are unidentifiably lost among the layers of fluid space that is constructed in an almost palimpsest manner. If the figures and their actions are more difficult to identify, the space is usually instilled with a greater level of concreteness, as it is easier, as a rule, to specify it with the help of toponyms or other manifestations of real relief (such as the floor plans of medieval buildings and cities, blueprints of mysterious floor drawings in South America, etc.). The locations have not been chosen arbitrarily. The allusion to the past, to the vanished cultures of the East and West that in some places overlap with highlights that strongly point to the present-day, remains inconspicuous, whereby we particularly emphasise on the places of conflicts that fill the news headlines for political or geostrategical reasons (e.g. the Middle East).
Thus, the images seem to thematise the desire for an appropriate time expressed through a meditation of the past, as well as the space expressed through the implied brutalisation of the present. The exception is the painting that, in a concrete gallery set-up, encompasses the whole as a sort of keystone: only the painting entitled Black NY (Črni NY) stands out from the others as it depicts a modern city. Which remains uninhabited. A black, inaccessible, completely dehumanised, almost total, but graphically extremely refined relief of lower Manhattan can be understood as a symbolic centre: as the epicentre where the motion mechanism of the world pulsates, and which is the source of all good and all evil. The landscapes on Maruša’s canvases gradually creep into the field of the abstract: gesturally strewn but colouristically subdued layers of paint nullify their factuality and the solid nature of the landscapes seems to be waning; the flickering nature of the accentuated pasty layers that are applied turns them into a poetic illusion, where only what is happening on the surface indicates that we are dealing with solid physical space. The membrane of the observed space is varied in substance and multi-layered: individual elements taken from the everyday world, in particular on the more recently fashioned canvases, associatively upgrade the context and message conveyed by the paintings. They thus remain semantically open, communicative, and even extremely sensual; we are dealing with unique visions of the world that demand strong imagination from the spectator.
Matjaž Brulc
CONTACT
Maruša Šuštar akad. slik., mag. um.
Srednja vas v Bohinju 87a
4267 Srednja vas v Bohinju
T: 041 978 359
E: marusa.sustar@gmail.com
