My works express my deep admiration for nature. I tell of its circular movements, its eternal repetition, change of seasons, its harmonic entirety, a component part of which humans are as well. Of the natural order that many no longer understand… To the viewer, I hold nature as an example. I thus criticise indirectly today’s blinded consumerist society and its alienation from nature.
I like to express myself using diverse media. I run several projects at the same time since they all complement and interfere with each other. With all of them, “I tell my Great story of nature”.
In 2003, I began to develop a series of round paintings. Leaves or petals that I line up concentrically from the middle of the format, letting them cross the borders of the surface, create the feeling of radiating into infinity. My paintings are marked by a very lengthy meditative process based on precise, tiny brush strokes. This is why the effect on the viewer is a calming one (like with the mandala).
For several years I was taking my round paintings to the woods in various seasons where I would arrange them into ambient compositions and then photo-document them in various light conditions. By “returning” paintings into nature I was trying to show that my works belonged to nature.
I have exhibited outdoors several times, mostly in parks and gardens.
The first time that I set up an outdoor “Gallery” was in the Tivoli park in 1997. I used canvas walls of the gallery to hang large paintings featuring four basic elements. I wanted for the observer to feel the earth beneath their feet and the sky above their head. I wanted for the vivacity of nature to help create the exhibition and keep changing it.
In recent years I have begun quite specifically to work in the open air and “collaborate” with nature. This has resulted in intimate “Exhibitions for birds and people passing by”. My transient installations are made of materials encountered in nature (fallen tree leaves, blossoms and fruit, fingerprints in the snow…). In my outdoor interventions, my role as the agent merges completely with nature, I literally become a part of it, which provides me with particular satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment.
I also began to paint little “Plant Portraits”. In general, portraits normally depict people, but using a precise realistic manner of painting I have personified plant leaves, thus trying to emphasise (remind) that each, no matter how tiny piece of nature is a complex microsystem that contributes to our planet and is as such worthy of our attention and admiration. (After all, man is also only a part of the entire nature.)
Parallel to meditative round paintings that result from a lengthy creative process, I was also making impressions for a number of years, i.e. small linocuts that were hand-painted with Indian ink which actually makes each piece an original. I was using those small “print-images”, with flower motifs to arrange them into large installations (of 200 pieces and over). Again, there is repetition, such as is the case in lining up the petals on paintings. Each individual impression is an entity of its own, but also a detail of the large “image”.
Occasionally I express myself by making drawings. Following my academy-inspired black expressive phase, I stopped drawing for a while, but gentle precise drawings made by pencil on small intimate formats soon began to emerge. After fostering it for 5 years, it ceased for long 13 years, only to “break out” in 2013 as large ambient drawings. I used charcoal to draw over the walls of the ZDSLU Gallery from the ground to the ceiling. I drew a forest that turned into the exhibition space for my works, thus newly discovering what an important place drawing occupies in my life.
Since then, I was making drawings on gallery walls on several occasions. I created the largest version so far for the exhibition The Forest Spirit (2014) in the Krško Gallery. It took me three weeks to cover the concave walls of a former baroque church with a large drawing of the forest extending over 200 square metres.
When exhibitions close, my drawings are painted white, which, conceptually, is an important part of my projects, speaking of constant passing, germinating and regenerating.
Throughout my creativity, I have also been accompanied by photography. What was first merely an aid in painting, soon turned into an indispensable part of my creative processes, and eventually became my main or only manner of expression in certain projects, for example – the “FOREST” large video project, which took me a whole year, was made using the time-lapse technique.
Toys, at the same time unique and well-known, invite people of all generations to interact with them. Using them I wish to address the observer even more directly, offering them a retreat from the material world, if only for a short while. Such a retreat is also offered by nature, which we often tend to forget.
My exhibitions express the unity of man, nature and art, seeking to bring art and also nature (which is a modern paradox) – closer to people of all generations. Relaxing, reassuring, entertaining and educational by nature, they fill the visitors with warm, healthy energy and a positive attitude.
All these features were expressed nicely in the Shelters exhibition (2016). In the dynamic lapidarium of the Boždar Jakac Gallery, I used found materials from nature to braid and intertwine them in situ into forms that took the visitor into multi-layered stories of the harmony between man and nature.
Integration of different branches of my creativity, which took place in 2017 in unfinished Božidar Jakac Gallery premises that I was allowed to use as my atelier, resulted in a series of drawings made on circular canvasses, which I entitled Dreams. As well as forests in the vicinity of Škofja Loka, Kostanjevica na Krki thus reaffirmed itself as an environment that provides me with particularly strong inspiration.
Mateja Kavčič, slikarka 