PETRIFIED, TINY, SENSUAL IMPRESSIONS

Nadja Zgonik / from the catalogue Do Not Touch!, Podsreda castle, 2001

“There are wall and pocket frescoes,” says Irena Romih in a documentary film called Portrait with a Background¹ with the matter-of-factness of someone making a completely everyday statement about some technical distinction with wich we are familiar. That’s why it seems to us that this sentence hints at yet another of the painter’s leading ideas. We all know that there are only wall frescoes, and that pocket frescoes are something that we have heard of for the first time. Yet with a little ingenuity in discerning hidden undertones of meaning we may feel that some other, newly established truth is ringing in the background of the sentence uttered. Indirectly, Irena Romih is telling us: “There’s a public and institutionalized life, which is loud and appears to be dictating the beat of life, and there’s a quiet, small, private life.” The first one is pompous and seemingly the only one that matters, because of the significance attributed to it by the media, whereas the other unfolds in seclusion, somewhere on society’s edge. With her latest works of art, Irena Romih turns upside down the established expectations of what is and is not important.

Since the last time we had the opportunity to see Irena Romih’s paintings in public, her painting has undergone considerable change. She has given up the technique of painting with wax and egg tempera on wooden boards, picking up instead a new technique and a new, totally unconventional basis for painting. This change, however, did not happen by accident but as a result of the painter’s collaboration with her friend Maja Šubic, who has decided to continue the fresco tradition of the Šubic family. This cooperation has already been going on since 1992, but at first, Romih did not look for meeting points between her painting production and fresco activity. What happened is precisely what may seem at first sight unexpected. The painter was enthralled by her fresco activity to the extent that she started to feel bound to it in her personal painting expression as well.

Irena Romih claims she is an artisan, explaining that the fresco technique aroused her interest at a particular moment as a challenge to develop this traditional technique and its material bearer in a new way. Not wishing to renounce the portability of paintings, she had to limit the size of the material, heavy stone, to handy dimensions. As the most convenient surface for her portable frescoes she chose tufa stone, which is porous and binds plaster very well, thus allowing for experimentation with either coloured plaster or colored drawing and pencil drawing. Although the technique is traditional, the painter treats it in an unconventional way.

But this shift was related to her previous artistic development. The problem of creating an object illusion, which led the painter from the “object-image”² to a real trompe-l’oeil recreation of fragments of the object world in two dimensions, is now transposed from the image to the object level. By using tufa a few centimeter thick and softly ground as a base, Irena Romih has already opted for a surface that contains the qualities of an object in itself. In so doing, she is not led by the identity of the object as fetish, but attaches herself to it because of its use and the feeling that accompanies its use. If her works remind us of pillows, their allusiveness rests in experience, since they don’t evoke the memory of the object’s function but conjure up an impression of how we experience this object.

Pillows and the shapes of duvet covers remind us of something soft, that offers safety and protection and represents home. Irena Romih presents the experience of this space by offering us sensual stimuli that remind us of home. To envelop us in these pleasant impressions she uses the principle of wrapping, apart from the strategy of creating soft surfaces. Just as a bed sags under the weight of a body and the blanket wraps a tired body, so are the painting surfaces' soft curves which bear the images of a sleeping body. These are fragments of the human body and its experience of this soft space. The model is always the same: the painter’s now four-year-old daughter Ema; sometimes these are images from old photos taken she was sleeping, others are from sketches of the sleeping girl. In the background, on the surface, a “story of fabrics” unfolds. Printed fabric represents “the basis” for childhood memories. Linked to them, through senses and experiences, are memories of the time in the painter’s life that now enwrap the little girl. The miniature pencil drawings on the plaster on tufa stone slates that rest on the soft, fresco-decorated tufa surface seem like layers stemming from memory, while at the same time fusing into a uniform tissue of supra-temporal feelings. The painter shows us a tiny world, full of fleeting moments that are significant for a brief instant as a sensual impression to the person experiencing them. The painter “petrifies” them, thereby convincing the viewer that the small, secluded life, elevated through feelings and personal stories, is more real than that loud life accompanied by inflated appearances.

1. The director of this documentary film, made between 1994 and 2000, is Amir Muratović.

2. Tomaž Brejc, "Stoletje slikarstva": Collection of Art Works of Factor Banka, Ljubljana 2000, exhibition catalogue, p. 100.

Exhibition Do Not Touch!!! at Equrna Gallery, Ljubljana, 2007