Art Critics’ Choice ...
Katarina Snoj

Katarina Snoj's paintings show images inhabiting blank canvases, where, distanced from external representation, they reflect on the role and meaning of painting at a time the image has become deeply embedded in our everyday actuality. The transformation of the visible world into a world of absent images, a world beyond the saturated image-making, constitutes a breakpoint in expanding the perception of perceptual reality as well as in adopting a new position towards it. The abstracting of visible reality frees the image from allusions to objects, deconstructs the gaze and creates discomfort in alienating it from concrete meaning and sense. Confronting the void, where everything seems to stand still and burst forth at the same time, calls for a reconsidered position by way of the awareness that the visibility of the image is invariably linked to its absence and that meanings are created in dialogue with the void and its ambiguity.

In unfolding the pictorial surface, the depicted voids surpass the representational possibilities of the visible, where the picture, in its role of pure signifier, means nothing and represents nothing. The narrative absence is emphasised through minimal painterly interventions that fill the voids in their performative mode. The painting displays its own characteristics and processes that occur either within or without the painting, on its surface. The transparency of the painting surface with its visible frames and sub-frames takes on an object-like character, where the image is dematerialised through the materiality of the medium. The present absence thus forms an integral part of the painting, the images crossing into an in-between space of perception, where the autonomy of visual perception is devalued and relegated to other senses.

In a departure from the conventional perception of the painting and its aesthetic value, Katarina Snoj's painting practice examines the persuasiveness of the painting medium, where in penetrating the established ways of thinking (non-)object phenomena, the artist deepens the questions of how else to think the painting, how the painting can capture the image and how this image appears through the viewer's perception. In particular, whether there are ways in which the viewer can think the image beyond any connotative and pragmatic suggestions and still be able to understand oneself and the world.

Tina Gerlec (1982, Maribor) holds a Master’s degree in economics from the University of Vienna and pursued a career in advertising as a self-employed professional for a number of years. In 2023, with the aim of showcasing current artistic output, Gerlec founded the Tkalka Gallery of Contemporary Art in Maribor, whose vision is implemented through bringing together young emerging artists, freelance curators and young critics. In 2024, within the context of the gallery, she launched a new initiative, “Mladi kritik” (Young Critic), a mentorship programme with a permanent column of exhibition reviews in the newspaper Večer.

Katarina Snoj (2002, Ljubljana) is completing her undergraduate first-degree study programme in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. In addition to painting, she also works in installation, graphic art and photography. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most notably at Media Nox, DobraVaga and Mala galerija Banke Slovenije, at +MSUM as part of a workshop with Aleksandra Vajd and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, and has held a solo show at the Odprto obrobje gallery. Her areas of activity occasionally include curatorship and art criticism.