Not titled | Cycle of paintings "Embedded" Painting

DUŠA JESIH »EMBEDDED« The paintings of Duša Jesih are conceived in cycles, each an improvement over that which has already been achieved, each an announcement of a different articulation of formal components in a classical orthogonal picture field. The changes that can be traced in her opus are easily recognizable from the standpoint of perception, while the signifying intent of the artist's visual formulations remains basically preserved and, as such, persist within the frame of conceptual dichotomies that create the communicative basis of the works. Precisely the fact that an image is able to mediate a wide specter of meanings far exceeding the empirical topos of painting makes possible the perpetual invention of visual variations within a given formal model understood as the logos of the subject that enters our vision. In her most recent exhibition made up of two series of painterly compositions, Duša exposes various structural registers to the problem of being caught in the contradictions of human existence. The search for balance between space and time, between movement and stillness, between the finite and the infinite becomes a constant in her works, a constant to which she returns to study in depth the combination of image-making units by creating fusions of morphological and chromatic elements of the visual idiom. And yet this constant remains invisible to the eyes: the gaze is caught in the complex of lines that divide the particular color planes; it glides between the surfaces that emanate different chromatic intensities, now more and now less, assimilating the gaze; it returns from the detail to the whole in order to once again disperse and search for other starting points, other vanishing points. With abstract images, empathy with what is painted is imperative. The viewer unconsciously follows this imperative with his senses, releasing himself to the low that is suggested to him by the visual entities and the relationships between them. The question of what an abstract painting represents, especially a painting that is grounded in geometrical schemes, is irrelevant for an aware individual because he knows that it has nothing to do with stories that are told to him by somebody else but that he must create his own narrative, his own concept of what he perceives in the visual work. The openness of the painter's discourse implies an openness of the viewer to develop an interpretation that rejects his own sensibility. The same painting will thus trigger a different response and interpretation in different viewers. The painting that is not created in keeping with the preconceived logic of representation and is without pre-assigned subject matter does not have to take into account standardized rules of pictorial art and thus builds on the conceptual foundations of an interactive effect articulated as a dialog between two subjects. On the level of production, the visualization of an ambiguous and unspecified sentiment or psychic condition is central, while the viewer's perception of visualized creative ideas generates a set of associations that may approach this sentiment or, ideally, become identical with it. Symbolism that was once universal now becomes elusive, unstable, and unpredictable as it adapts itself to the coexistence of personal references in an emphatically plural sphere of artistic idioms. On the other hand, the self-reflectivity of the image-making process ceases to be the one ant only standard to which the painterly process subjects itself; it is here where one finds the most significant difference between the poetics of modernism and the condition of painting after modernists decline. Here lies the reason for the revealed inadequacy, if not the irrelevance of the critical vocabulary that was once suitable for the analysis of artistic tendencies in the context of schools, groups, and styles. What remains relevant are individual works of art, their inner coherence and the suggestiveness of their visual structures. In one of the exhibited series, Duša Jesih still relies on extremely stylized anthropomorphism to fashion the composition of the work, while in another series she goes beyond the border of allusions in order to continue the process of structuring the painting solely with geometrical forms that differ from each other in terms of color and hue. The two series are complementary; their constitutive units are juxtaposed as possibilities of expressing the same, or at least similar, subject matter using different methods. Variations on the theme of being caught between two poles of existential aporia in the paintings of Duša Jesih come to the fore by the spontaneous reconstruction of the expressive mode that was considered canonical until very recently. This expressive mode has been out drowned by individualized metaphors shining through the layers of the image. The interpretative key has to be found by each individual viewer; the painter has done her job by delineating the field of vision in which the key lies. Brane Kovič, art critic Cycle of paintings »embedded«, Mestna galerija Nova Gorica, March 2010