Group exhibition (Anja Jerčič Jakob, Tina Konec, Plateauresidue, Maja Pučl, Lucija Stramec, Joni Zakonjšek)
Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Koroška, Slovenj Gradec (SI)
30. 3. – 28. 5. 2023
Curator: Katarina Hergold Germ
The fragile images of Tina Konec, who abandoned colour in her drawing of perfect forms of fragmented scenes from the life of trees, fascinate with the effect that the artist achieves with minimal means, when she draws lines and dashes on the emptiness of paper from which images gradually thicken and finally emerge as crowns of conifers. The latter, despite their otherwise sharp and prickly nature, appear soft and undulating in her depictions, and layered on top of each other they create the impression of unusual density; they are like a thick needle-strewn blanket through which light penetrates the darkness below only here and there. Lines represents the main element of her visual expression. In a technically perfected manner, she builds scenes with a condensed stringing together of countless lines, which in the end create the illusion of an incredibly effective close-up of particles of the needle structures of the treetops, framing those parts of the whole that are attracted by the light of the sky. Through the rapid undulation of the organic forms of branches, we can sense the contact of the material with the spiritual on a symbolic level. Tina Konec’s gaze directed towards the heights of treetops shows us again and again decentralized images of trees that seem to stretch far beyond the depicted. Subtle images woven from a microcosm of densely intertwined organic shapes flow from picture to picture in a host of monochromatic variations, creating when juxtaposed the illusion of a forested landscape. Sometimes Konec places the individual elements of her integrated cycles in spatial layouts through mutually coexisting connected parts, which thus become a single whole and work like an inverted map of wooded expanses. Subtle images of trees, objects of the artist’s fascination for many years, appear in her cycles in different atmospheres: in addition to scenes of hazy shadows, where the visual field is based on a double-layered transparent scheme that contributes to the persuasiveness of the depicted, there are also, in contrast to daytime scenes drawn with ink on light paper, the extremely interesting night series, where the treetops live their secret lives on a dark background, and the varied structures of coniferous branches and twigs in the absence of all colours on the dark surface seem almost like a photographic negative. Night is a special time of the day, when people go into a different, special perceptual state. When the dense darkness absorbs all of the observer’s senses, the morphology of the trees also changes: clear, recognizable shapes disappear and a different vision of the world opens up. But even if the trees in the forest where people feel sheltered during the day at night turn into scary apparitions of the human imagination, in Tina Konec’s night paintings, they are anything but in the dense dark landscapes, we feel a sense of serenity.
Katarina Hergold Germ