In her art practice, Iva Tratnik strolls boldly through visual art, within which she works with various mediums such as painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and through performance, within which she explores voice, movement, mask. In her exhibitions, she also combines the visual with the staged, often positioning her paintings in a spatial manner as a kind of scenography and underscoring them with light and sound so that the viewer can experience them with the whole body and all the senses. The exhibition at Rajhenburg Castle is divided into two parts. The main part, showcasing paintings and textile collages, is installed in the Great Hall in a classical arrangement that meets the specific requirements of the space and its use. The second part, consisting of a spatial-sound installation, on the other hand, is featured separately in the Round Hall. All the works shown in the exhibition have been created in the last 10 years, with a focus on the most recent works.
Characteristic of these works – as of her painting in general – is that they are populated by various objects, plants and animals, as well as their fragments and remains, each of which is quite ordinary and recognisable, but which together form an imaginary, fantastic whole. The artist creates this tension by selecting motifs from completely different, even contradictory environments (natural-artificial, organic-industrial, present-past) and arranging them in her paintings in such a way that they defy all physical laws. Either the spatial relationships between them are (grotesquely) disproportionate, or else they float weightlessly in an undefined "space" that is a cross-section of more or less fantastic landscapes, or in front of a flat background that is monochrome or overlaid with various patterns. In most cases, these patterns are reminiscent of the decorations of indoor spaces, but here and there they are also literally taken out of this environment and used as wallpaper, like the blanket in the collage The Heart of a Clown (2014) or the flooring in Doubt is Beautiful (2011). The artist uses patterns to create a synaesthetic dimension in her work, to stimulate certain feelings and perceptions, such as the soft fluttering that unfolds from the soft fabrics on the wings of a giant moth, or the steady pulse that a black and red chequered pattern spreads in the background of the heart in the collages and the creaking crawling of a multitude of beetles or the rustling of grasses that we hear next to the paintings.
The fantastic worlds that emerge through this process take hold of the viewer and draw them in. Not only because they feel small and lost in the face of the large format of the support and the gigantic dimensions of the depicted motifs, but also because they cannot identify with anything. For nowhere in these works does a human figure appear, and if it does, it is tiny compared to the other motifs, or seems like a disembodied apparition besides their full-bloodedness. This means that the human being does not exist in this fantastic world as a subject to be structured and understood, but is present in it only through his remains – parts of the skeleton or things he once produced and used – as a thing among things. This leads us to think that the fantastic world depicted in the paintings is actually a kind of posthuman community in which worms embrace figurines, beetles exchange pearls for larvae and light bulbs reflect the skulls of extinct birds.
By depicting a fantastic world where human beings do not exist (any longer), the artist subtly and unobtrusively critiques the real world in which we live. Recently, in the face of global climate change, the disintegration of ecosystems, extinction of species, lack of clean water, undecipherable mounds of waste and new viruses, it has become quite clear that the prevailing capitalist system is simply not sustainable and is slowly but surely leading us to devastation. Predictions for the future based on existing assumptions are not promising and calls for radical change are growing louder. It will not be the end of the world if we fail to implement these changes, but only the end of humankind. And one of the clearest messages conveyed by Iva Tratnik's painting is that life on Earth will survive and evolve without us, perhaps even better, stronger, faster…
Mojca Grmek, Exhibition curator
