FLORA AND FAUNA (with Vladimir Leben), Mestna galerija Nova Gorica, 2012 

What is it that joins flora and fauna, the vegetable and animal kingdoms? Both are, no doubt, alive and almost all around us, being here mostly longer than us and maybe will be here also when we are no more unless, of course, mankind, expert in any kind of destruction, takes care that all of us toddle off at the same time …

Flora and fauna have been an inspiration of old to artists, and very different ones who represented them from diverse impulses. Some have romantically fallen in love with them, searching in them for some primal, primitive existence, source and origin and assurance of a humanity built into the natural environment; others glorified the Creators omnipotence in them, warning of the necessity of humility in confronting this; a third way looked at them from the perspective of universal bio-cosmic interconnectedness, an automatic, self-coordinated organic complexity; for a fourth, flora and fauna were merely a very broad and useful series of possibilities for metaphors, symbolic hints of all kinds; a fifth demonstrated human predominance over them with the help of live motifs from the natural environment, glorified our kind as the ‘crown of the world’ … Common to almost all of them though, was that they did not look at the vegetable and animal kingdom so much as themselves but to express their human relationship to them and the wider natural environment, to create figurative metaphors from these kinds of motifs, yet shrouded testimonies to the author’s, or a wider human existence’s attitudes, points of view, searches, fears …

On the other hand man needs other co-existent beings more than they need him, yet of course it much depends on how he imagines cohabitation with them. The latter could be egoistic, destructive, parasitical … or harmonic, co-natural, sincere, friendly … There is no doubt that the artists from this exhibition are much closer to the latter way, yet even though they have much in common, each of them is of course an entirely unique artistic being, plant, animal, man.

Her “Exhibitions for Birds and Coincidental Walkers” which she occasionally arranges on forest paths from fallen leaves, might the most felicitously testify to the nature of the personal and artistic views of Mateja Kavčič, about her deeper understanding and perception of the natural environment. The products of this spontaneous land art of hers are of course meant to die naturally, which certainly does not hold for her other works, even though these are also closely connected to nature, where she always sets out afresh for inspiration.

There she searches for and chooses tree leaves or blossom petals, cones, acorns, ferns … then she composes, forms compositions, photographs them, or takes them home and just starts to paint, depending on the basis and phase of its natural cycle, stage of its durability or decay. With the help of the ‘mentor of nature’ she creates her perfect round canvases – the circle is an ideal form, a symbol of unison, perfection … – on which there was a circular ‘accumulation’ at one time, repetition of one lone leaf multiplied, or fruit; in the latest period on individual paintings she arranges leaves of the same tree in different phases of their autumnal changes.

Therefore this is not only about the result of the work, but the whole process is important – which all the intuitive listening to nature brings to it and is suggestively contained within it. If Mateja Kavčič tried in the past to come closer to the deeper principles of nature through an associative treatment of four basic elements, cosmic/primary matters, she has focused her attention mainly on cycles within it lately. Her large format projection of time lapse photographs of a forest which she has been observing changes, transitions connected with rotations of the seasons throughout the year, puts the viewers in front of a mirror of the natural order, stream of things, disengages them at least for a while from the bustle, errant superficiality, stress of contemporary life, and pulls them back into a primary environment from whose arms their species had been once drawn so senselessly, insidiously.

To this initiation, ‘return home’, the paintings follow, mostly in green-brownish-reddish tints, the natural transitions of the colours of autumnal leaves. Elements in them are sometimes arranged after this colour scale, sometimes mixed, which the artist alternately makes artistically purified, refined, or again vivacious, stimulating compositions. An apparent arrangement of the leaves by their size, from smaller ones in the centre to bigger and bigger ones towards the outer edge, and skilful use of natural details – for instance in the ray-like lines connecting the lighter symmetries on the leaves of ivy – add a look and effect of a kind of natural mandala, successions, to these round paintings, and at the same time instruments for genuine, spiritual veneration of our natural environment, for an unobtrusive awakening of the consciousness of our connection with it.

In order to recognise that the work of Vladimir Leben is also not without connection to flora it is enough to examine his painting Zlati dež (Golden Rain) in which a Dalmatian dog infatuatedly pees on a similarly coloured birch tree, yet the centre of gravity of the artist’s creativity is still dedicated to the animal kingdom, at least at first sight. A periodic researcher and guide through the Galapagos, independent art eco system, which he conceived – with the stimulation of Mr. Darwin – together with his art colleague, represents animals in various ways and with various content modulations. The latter are often revealed through the witty titles of his paintings, or many times, ironic, waggish artistic hints. Leben belongs amongst those rare local artists who’s work can without any problem wheedle a smile from the viewer, but because of this he should not be taken any less seriously. His works from the newer period are not only vivacious colour-wise, visually attractive with warm content, but they are as a rule multi-layered metaphors of contemporaneity for which it seems the animal kingdom is simply a welcome, amiable expressive means.

The triptych with the representations of groups of various dogs in the metro or suburban train carriages was, for instance, commenced on the basis of newspaper reports about Moscow’s beasts, curs, puppies which drive every morning ‘to work’ in town where they nourish themselves and come back tired in the evening. Similar was the inspiration for the painting ^ernobil interier in which various animals replaced previous human inhabitants in an abandoned flat. We could say that it is about well chosen painted illustrations of newspaper articles with the addition of the painter’s imagination, yet Leben succeeds in more than that. His animal figures begin to live with sovereignty in front our eyes and remind us of hard facts from their and our real lives. Especially with titles such as Nevidni delavci (Invisible Workers) it is completely impossible to avoid the association with a difficult social reality, of which the painter is definitely aware. Even though he warns us of hard facts through soft ‘non-painful’ ways, he mitigates their hardness merely apparently, giving them a different, more abundant form.

And what to say about a painting such is his Lajka? This is definitely one of the stronger metaphors that a contemporary artist can find, it is equally inexorable in its message as it is gentle in Leben’s painted treatment. Instead of boiling with rage because of an inconceivable human instrumentalisation of animals – a synonym for nature – for reaching narrow technical goals which should contribute to realisation of not entirely imaginative aims, conditional upon short sighted interests, he simply shows us a dog. It is as if he is saying: “Look at that!” and with this he says everything.

Vladimir P. Štefanec

Back to first page