Renewed landscape
Painting with poetry
Renewed landscape was an exhibition held by the House of culture Črna na Koroškem between the 3rd of December 2021 and the 15th of January 2022. I introduced myself to the local community for the first time.
Nina Stopar starts her creative process as a dancer whose immateriality of movement is embodied in colour and line. Thus her paintings are created from an act that is not exclusively painting and whose symbolism is limited here by the written word. The series of paintings on paper titled Renewed Landscape consists of 21 works. Each is accompanied with a poem speaking about intimate experiences and complementing the painting.
Dancer, painter and poet Nina Stopar returns to the world of painting with careful steps. The traces she leaves on the white background meld with the renewed landscape into which she returns reborn. The ephemeral impressions with strong and intense colours do not give the viewer any other way out aside from some ingrained thoughts. Nina builds the associative field with basic artistic tools: trace of the coloured pencil embraces the field of colour and the surface of the painting is adorned with dried flowers seemingly at random. Such composition, built with colour, dry flowers and white background, does not represent an external reality – neither on a symbolic, cosmic, transcendental nor spiritual level.
The paintings do not contain geometric forms – not even straight lines. It seems that the artist is satisfied with the straight edges of the painting, everything within is chaos and intertwining. Due to the organic nature of the painted forms, the temptation to seek tangible meanings is even greater, but it is unnecessary and superfluous. However, the poems that accompany the paintings change everything. Previously abstract, vague compositions, closer to natural disorder and fictional landscapes, now limit the associative flow with the help of poems. Symbols, painted with simple artistic means, connected to the word acquire completely different connotations. Yellow, pink and blue, appearing in the poems as well, evoke in the reader and viewer passionate memories of muttering retreats of restless nights exclusive to female eroticism.
Jernej Kožar