at home with antonio fusco sve o grijanju - DalCasa

64Neno, 120x130 cmRecycles, nastajanje -nestajanje / Recycles,gestation - disappearancetions and changes by becoming a gesture, abstractionand emptiness, only to repeatedly return and deal with itselfand its relationship with reality in a new, changed context.It has changed with the dynamic of reality changes;sometimes almost harmoniously, and sometimes very competitivelyas harsh opposition. Petra Grozaj’s paintings arecertainly based on reality, just not on the same level of realityat all times. They reveal the artist’s sensibility for sometypes of “artificial experiences” and an approach to mediaimages as “reality that is more real than actual reality”,while also adapting her own world of images and findingsimulacrum to be a legitimate choice and starting point.The perfect example of this subject treatment is her 2006exhibit called “Girls from the Catalogue” at the Josip RačićGallery in Zagreb, when the artist presented herself with astring of female faces, portraits of nameless models fromfashion magazines of previous years. The display of theseplastic, specific, standardized faces put emphasis on voidsin their eyeballs, which revealed monotonous shades ofbackground and evoked slightly morbid feelings from theobservers, as they faced something that resembles a livinghuman mask. The emptiness found its way through the oralcavity and female nostrils by reducing a seductive, eroticexpression on these magazine-cover faces to the grotesquedeformation of slight humanoid traces. Althoughthe author’s comment is self-explanatory, it doesn’t containthat overemphasized preaching note or a lamentationover the exploitation power of the media, nor does it focuson the worn-out story about alienation and loss of identity.Petra Grozaj only implies or diagnoses the situation with herpainting procedure (contrasting the sketching principle,which uses sharp and black lines, with the painting principle,which uses both transparent and thick layers of colour),as well as with the line up of the gallery display, which seesher not only use different-sized paintings with the same motif,but also the very fashion catalogue that served her asthe base to find those faces.In the foreword to “Girls from the Catalogue”, art criticIvana Mance comments on the work of Petra Grozaj by introducingterms like “traumas” and “symptoms” into her interpretation,and she says: “Every moment of our talking orbehaviour is a potential symptom of a suppressed traumathat we can’t control, but also the only place from whichwe can indirectly approach it.” Female figures on Petra’spaintings “become symptomatic fragments of some hiddenstoryline”. Mance cleverly concludes her extensiveanalysis by stating that “the reality that is implied by thepainting doesn’t occur as an event from the past, but ratheras a projection from the future; its basis is not featured inthe psychological world of the author’s subject, but ratherin the reality of communication. Petra Grozaj’s paintings arecompletely directed towards the audience in almost exhibitionistmanner: by openly demonstrating their blindness,her characters are begging to be observed while withholdingas objects at the same time; they are demonstrativelypainted over the stereotypical female faces that are nothingelse but notorious pornographic objects (...)”.The author explained her work with the following words:“Paintings are a reflection of the contemporary societyI live in, and serve as a medium to reflect my own introspection,situations and relationships with a certain ironicdetachment. I am curious to find ways to express passage