References

Ending space - dr. Tomaž Brejc
The time which I belong to - Mateja Sever
The sublime and romanticism in contemporary Slovene painting - Andrej Medved
A hole in time - Barbara Sterle Vurnik
Somewhere in time - Maja Megla
Artists about art : Lee Krassner
Artists about art : Georgia O'Keefe
Artists about art : Agnes Martin
Artists about art : Louise Nevelson
Artists about art : Auguste Rodin

A hole in time

Mateja Sever is one of the painters of the young generation of Slovenian artists whose work has surely contributed a great deal to the contemporary Slovenian art. With an extraordinary subtle feeling for the expression of the colour she has managed to create numerous unforgettable mental landscapes, far-reaching, remote and surrealistic horizons.

To define her art as abstract or sublime would be only a very loose frame. In reality, her works go much deeper. On one hand, her latest photographic opus therefore surprises and yet on the other hand it does not at all.

In her works from the early 1990s the aluminium was shining from the surfaces of the paintings which were placed on the rocky edges reaching for the sky as if trying to build
a surreal painting within the painting, as if trying to destruct the realistic image and with the direct use of outer light as an autonomous medium – at least for a moment – seemingly erase the border between two possible realities: the inside and outside of a human being.
After that she dived solely into the field of painting and for quite a while developed her ideas further.
But now the photographs emerged – again she stepped out of the canvas.
Yet, she kept her strong painting character, preventing us to think of any other medium.
She is offering us light again; although its fluid, its density, its glitter is not presented with paint. Once captured in the camera, she freezes it, one layer after another. As she puts the layers together, she keeps transparency, to enable free and random trespassing from one image to another – like our memories that peel and reveal themselves in their own unlogical order.
And again we have a feeling that those images are the memories, taken straight from the artist’s intimate world. The realistic images are placed over and blended into one another to the point of losing recognizability and autonomy of the original single image. With rotation of the levels they are made into a completely new, surrealistic whole.

This time the colour is made by hypnotic glitter of the light – and not vice versa – and, as such, creates real optical distortions of the compositions.
Her latest works do not deviate from the artist’s development so far. They are still about her momentary impressions: the imprints of her mental excursions out of our time and space which happened parallel to the reality.

It is true that they are captured with a camera – but with the painter’s eye. With the eye that paints the worlds that are not from here, but from somewhere where there’s no past, no present, no future. They are like illusions from somewhere Beyond, where Holes in Time lurk, where there is Silence, Where there is Noone.

BARBARA STERLE VURNIK

(from the catalogue “Somewhere in Time”, photo-exhibition, Ljubljana, November 2006)

Links

www.ljnovice.com/galerija/sever-mateja
www.dlul-drustvo.si
www.equrna.si
www.plesnicar.si
www.zigaokorn.info
www.arven.org
www.kiki.si
www.ljudmila.org/stripcore/damjan
www.kapelica.org
www.galerija.skuc-drustvo.si
www.aluo.uni-lj.si
www.zveza-dslu.si
www.ljubljana.si
www.katrin-gruentzig.ch

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