IVA TRATNIK
Blackboard
May 18, 2012–June 17, 2012
The opening of the exhibition on May 18, 2012, will be conceived as a musical, culinary and dance “live painting” performed by the artist’s colleagues. While for the occasion of the Night at the Museum, on June 16, 2012, the public will be invited to join the artist in the process of creating, which will be accompanied by music instruments. The evening, animated with music and movement, will be once again left to surprises and coincidences.
The space has turned into a painting and a painting into space. The spectator will become an artist, the artist an observer. In dialogue with space, they will converge into a motor that, in the limited time of the opening of the new exhibition of the Celje artist Iva Tratnik, will be operating with the artistic medium. In her new project Tabla [Blackboard], the artist transformed the space of the Fine Art Saloon into a huge black surface that functions as an old school blackboard. The wall surface has already been subjected to the artist’s intervention; her work and space are now waiting for the public to intervene into. The project explores the position and the potential of the medium of painting through the process of creating and dialogue with the spectator. In the initial stage, drawings made with chalk (images of live and dead nature, macroscopic images…) as the first result of the artist’s process communicate between each other, while during the opening they will (or will not) include in its communication circuit also other drawings made by the visitors. The artist thus wishes to bring painting as close as possible to the spectator, demystifying the creative process. In its practice, she distances herself from artistic product as a tangible artifact that in a time in which we are all too overwhelmed with “things” has lost its real value, and has placed in the foreground the event. As a result of her interest in the movement of the body in space and its performative dimensions, she opts for vast surfaces. Her large-format paintings were presented last year in her project Veščin prah [Moth’s Dust] and as part of her collaboration with Marko Jakše (Bojni ples za zbombandirano luno – Battle Dance On The Bombarded Moon) in which she, as co-author, intervened into the poetics of the established artist. She now wishes to pass a similar “responsibility” on to the occasional visitors to the Fine Art Saloon that will enter into dialogue with her work in order to prompt the question as to what is going to happen with the Blackboard on which drawing and erasing seems to be so easy. The visitors will thus enter a seemingly finished work of art, interrupt it and leave it together with the artist at the end of the exhibition. While Iva Tratnik doesn’t believe in the painting as a beautiful, finished object, she does believe in the power of the painting medium in its broadest sense. In the case of Blackboard, the painting is a changing social formation, an expression of temporariness.
Mesečnik maj 2012
