Nadja Gnamuš
ABOVE
Painting scenes of Maruša Šuštar are established on the cleft between landscape and figures and also by mapping their interdependent relationship, where the abstract and the concrete shift in the effect. Her art of painting demands a special aspect. The figures that grow within vast landscapes seem as points on the map, subject to distant aspect, which belongs to the spectator, but at the same time acts on the outside.
The portrayed scenes are geographically precisely determined, sometimes also cartographically evident, because they are defined by regions, countries, towns, roads or streets. The painting proposals are very concrete, although their starting points in the final image are abstracted and remodelled by the materiality of coloured masses. The artist finds them among photograph and satellite images, mostly taken from the server Google.earth or from National Geographic documentary news, as well as from her own footage. It is mostly about the readymade elements that have intentionally, conceptually and during the process of painting after modernism played an important role. The directness of looking has been replaced by “an intermediate” or a model image, already encoded translation of the view. At the same time, through the technological interference, the world becomes more transparent and accessible.
Using painting proposals for Maruša Šuštar means on one hand an obvious painting tool and a conotated semantic marker on the other hand. Readymade images are like pieces of information to the painter, which enable the accessibility of an unusual view: the artist chooses lifted points of view, which are, considering the everyday frontal observation of the world, the least present. The choice of cadre involves distance, because it creates a distant view of perspective, from which the world seems like an anthill and the figures like stains inside the cinemascopic expansion. The visual field suggests the view, which goes along side and it is present at all times, regardless our knowledge and vigilance. This is a view that embraces the many perspectives of present bodies and one angle with an overview on the crowd. Such perspective seems like it is above human, but it is dehumanized and desubjectivized, the unseen point of view of some generalised supremacy. The distance lies in the all-visibility that is foreign and unnatural in precluding all the covers which combine the everyday experience of watching. In the context of a supervised, uncovered and impersonal modern society is the most suitable the panoptic scheme. Michael Foucault defined panopticism as “pure architect or optic system”, based on implanting bodies in space in terms of hierarchical organization and relationships of power. It is essential that all bodies are subordinate to the field of visibility. The individual is seen, but cannot see himself; »he is the subject of information, never the subject in communication «.
In Maruša Šuštar's painting there is the consciousness about commanding relationships within the globalized world explicitly present. Frequently the photograph image proposals represent shots of crisis areas and geographic targets of the new West colonialism (Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel). It is interesting that the pictures, used in New York, are different in composition and mood from the rest of them. The New York images express a dark and soulless atmosphere, which results from a smothered, even-tuned colour scale and geometrical urban net, which effects as a chessboard for moving the pieces and to realize the organizational disciplinary mechanism of modern society.
But New York represents in this art a symbolical place of entrapment and it is more an exception than a rule. Although the point of view always implicates an over-view the compositions of these vast landscapes usually do not fully correspond to the architect figure of Panopticon. Factography is transformed and overflowed image facture in such way that the landscapes gradually lose the point of actual, concrete reference space. The painting intervention and photography proposal pass each other and transform their own territories. The view vanishes and blends in with the background. It seems as if the artist puts a bigger interest on the geographical, geophysical and geographical features of depicted places – their scenery, instead of the geopolitics and political mapping of the land. Especially on the last paintings locations are more and more (politically) neutral and picked out mostly because of their geographic specifications. She is attracted by them and searches them on these images. They have all in common desolateness, wide emptiness and a kind of initially undistinguished landscape.
Maruša Šuštar makes the landscape surface as the material grounding for the picture. The painting facture is in spite of autonomous moving of design mass and collecting colour stains not an abstract field, but in micro structure results from naturalistic grounding. Topography is expressed through pictographic elements. It is not unusual that the artist is fascinated with old maps which are sometimes included into her paintings. On old maps decorative and pictographic elements have played an important role in presenting earth, later that role was left to the utilitarian symbols, which had more to do with measurements and distances than with the landscape of that area . The artist pays much attention to the corporality of the painting: balancing differently dense and worked colored mass, alternating trace of spade and brush, spontaneous dropping and intentional stains all create chaotic matter and lively facture – a sensually experienced surface of the painting that shows the sensitivity of earth’s surface. Optical tactility in detecting these images, where eye optics effect as a touching organ, craves for magical makeover of the view into a touch and a mean of connection. The artist’s wish for discovering primeval earth and its domestication is seen in the haptic texture. To delineate the landscape means you have experience it and belong to it.
The shaping of the surface and the landscape is the most important on these paintings. Only then earth becomes available to man’s mapping, netting and drawing and then fragments of maps, ground plans, architectural drawings, figures, inscriptions and signs appear above it and civilize the landscape with its reminiscences. But basically, these landscapes are designed as products of natural forces and random configurations, which are independent from the disciplined geometry of Panopticon and instrumentalized organization of human life. But there is nothing romantic about them. Moreover they function as metaphysical, apocalyptical visions, above human will and power, where the only possible subordination is to the power of nature and fragility of life.
Figures within these expanses function as anchorage. At a close look, you can see they are like stains that create distance and difference to the field in which they are placed. They are displayed in the seemingly random groups, which fall into individuals that are rather than individuals perceived as members of the species. The typical distant angle of sight and anonymity, which compels us to approach the figure mentally in order to discover what it is doing, remind us of the scenes of the Spanish painter Juan Genovese. His paintings have an image of violence, oppression and terrorism in the background. With Maruša Šuštar we do not have that impression of the crowd's collective effect, but an impression of a group of scattered and displaced points of view. Her protagonists excite us with a feeling of inactiveness. They appear on the scene as observers that indicate an expiration of an event or express premonition which stays outside the field. Their moving in the space seems lost, without an obvious cause and defined action. The longer we watch them, the more it appears that only existence is portrayed.