Metka Krasovec

GESTES SANS PAROLES

ZVONKO MAKOVIC (1989)

Four figures are depicted on the painting Madonna di Senigallia by Piero della Francesca in the Urbino Gallery: the Madonna with the child and two angels. The ceremoniously upright carriage of the Lady is completely identical with the vertical axis of the painting. Shown without movement, she seems to embody a tangible present or even beter a presence arrested forever. Even the child in her arms with its hand liffed in benediction only indicates movement: it is a hand representing divine blessing, not a hand in movement. The engels, placed summetrically one on each side, finalize this impression. Their arms, crossed on their bosom, complete this carefully constructed peace and the appearance of profound immobility. However, it would be completely erroneous to conclude that the great Renaissance artist is inscribing immobility into his figures, submitting them to a static order, enclosing them into a here and now frozen for eternity. When several years ago I first found myself before that painting, I remember I was excited in the first place by the reflection of daylight on these heavenly faces. More precisely, by the streams of sharply focused light entering through the leff window, throwing light on the figures and objects, and questioning the false materiality of the Lady, the child Jesus and the angels. In the proceses, the small curls in the angels hair was transformed into a landscape of pure light.
It is the presence of this light that invests the heavenly protagonists with natural loffiness. In their natural loffiness Piero della Francesca uses the gestures and even more the looks exchanged by his figures to close in a clearly discernible mental cosmos. The looks, offen almost hidden under lowered eyelids, trace an exceptionally fine network of relationships among the figures which also includes the viewer who happens to stand before the picture. In other words it is these looks that bring mobility to the still, arrested bodies of the protagonists. Aided by the shaffs of daylight, this scene with the Madonna, child and two angels is suddenly made singularly alive and full of sensuous integrity.

On her new paintings Metka Krašovec presents beautiful, unusually expressive faces of women whose looks and gestures reveal a trusting affection. These are faces appealing to us indirectly without asking us to participate in an exchange. More than that, the observer although involved with the situation of the picture, always remains outside it There is a limit which strictly delimits the reality of the painting from the objective, living reality of the observer. The quiet,incredibly engaging movements of the women, significant expressions of their faces, along with the blurred and somewhat dreamy background and, very important, extremely sensuous colours, all of these reveal quite unam- biguously an exceptional emotional force. This power becomes a kind of cohesive factor condensing the scene into a very resilient unit. The protagonists of these paintings have been subjected to a special kind of atSstraction. Reduced to pure presence (most of the paintings bear this very tittle - "Presences") they seem to resist all notion of plot, all closure into a system of hierarchic relations. If the scene were reduced to plot, the scenes would also be reduced to one single meaning, which was not the intention of the artist. On the contrary: the very absence of plot becomes more powertul than words. What is most present in the painting is a state, certainly not a story or chronicle of some happening. Only allusions to something that cannot be clearly expressed, that is only present in hints, in extremely private codes. Soff, confidential gestures, looks full of kindness, the warm flow of strongly feminine emotions - this is how we can attempt to translate the possible meanings of the states rendered in the paintings. The faces are always bathed in light which imbues their expression with visionary spirituality. The fine, smooth membranes of faces also turn into screens on which are projected inner, quite obvious dramas warn by each of them like a trade mark. The delicate stretched immobility of the skin seems to emerge from somewhere deep down, as if influenced by the sensual energy that wished to liberate itself, and which can be recognized in the looks that the figures direct at us. Although the majority of these figures have the faces of real persons, these paintings should never be considered portraits. Submitting the iconographic motif to a special kind of abstraction, Metka Krašovec was also emptying the faces of the real persons of traces of reality, incorporating them into the ideal scheme of the Beautiful and giving them the beauty of angels. Before affirming that Every angel is terrible Rilke says in his First Elegy that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, a beginning which we can still bear, admiring it so much because it calmly refuses to destroy us.
I honestly do not know if the artist was aware of Rilke Duino Elegies during the three years she has been painting these marvelous pictures. However, we know that Rilke is one of her favourite poets who has already been alluded to, and even quoted in some of her earlier work. At this point Rilke s verses seem just one possible way, more direct than any other, of finding a key to the reading of Metka Krašovec's painting.

What is the relevaNCE OF Piero della Francesca in this context? I should say that perhaps the work of that artist of the Quattrocento represents a sort of starting point, a primary impulse from which was derived the present idiom of this modern artist. This does not merely concern the formal side of her work, her effort to make the objects and figures solid and durable, and to give her clearly outlined volumes the character of a tangible present within carefully constructed spaces full of unbaunded serenity. From the work of this early Renaissance artist Metka Krašovec has inferred certain much more complex affinities or happily absorbed precepts. They concern the constant balancing between perfect immobility and a profound emotional force which emanates from the figures presented in the paintings, which can be decyphered in the delicately hinted gestures and the profound looks which characterize the angelically stil bodies possessed of quite unreal beauty.

Exhibitions at home and abroad:

Beograd, Ljubljana, Piran, Milano, Graz, Celje, Dubrovnik, London, Maribor, Zagreb, Ajdovscina, Slovenj Gradec, Koeln, Radenci, Leverkusen, Novi Sad, Bonn-Beuel, Wilhelmshafen, Stoskholm, Malmoe, Koper, Sarajevo, Trieste, Sezana, Varazdin, Nova Gorica, Chattanooga, Kranj, Split, ..... ect.

Awards:

Zagreb, Rijeka, Castelnuovo - Monti, Milano, Slovenj Gradec, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Zagreb, Ljubljana, ....ect.

To Lojze Logar's works - To Zdenko Huzjan's works

This exhibition is provided by Janez Stefanec's Netgallery.