My Noiseless Entourage, Conduit Gallery, Dallas, TX, Feb 29th-April 4th 2020
“We were never formally introduced.
I had no idea of their number.
It was like a discreet entourage
Of homegrown angels and demons
All of whom I had met before
And had since largely forgotten.
In time of danger, they made themselves scarce.
Where did they all vanish to?”
My Noiseless Entourage, 2005, Charles Simic
American Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner
Titled after a passage by the Yugoslavian-American poet Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Maja Ruznic, traverses shifting landscapes. These works, as well as the poem, describe the matrixial subject, the gaze of a phantom ‘other’, the core nature of the figures she paints and draws. Ruznic’s subjects are moving to and from locations, in and out of existence.
It is unsurprising that Ruznic’s paintings dropped almost all their saturation when she moved to New Mexico from California. Surrounded by the placid silence of southwestern dust, the paintings are now the color of twilight.
Ruznic states, “I realized when I could see the tooth of the canvas, the canvas is breathing. That is a different kind of texture”. Ruznic starts by pouring thin layers of previously used Gamsol (paint thinner) from her preceding paintings. There is no waste in this methodology, one painting grows out of the other. This is Ruznic’s signature mark-making, using gravity to place color and form onto the canvas or paper, which she then re-negotiates with line and brushwork.
Her double major in art came after studying psychology, and some of these studies indicated to her the way that memory exists in the mind. It is not a static thing that is recalled and then put back in its place; it is a living, developing idea which is never really objective. Ruznic’s work is like this, a dream object. This is by design, as she wants the viewer to feel as if they are trying to capture a cloud in a bottle – something that seems plausible but no one has ever done.
*installation photos by Megan DeSoto
“We were never formally introduced.
I had no idea of their number.
It was like a discreet entourage
Of homegrown angels and demons
All of whom I had met before
And had since largely forgotten.
In time of danger, they made themselves scarce.
Where did they all vanish to?”
My Noiseless Entourage, 2005, Charles Simic
American Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner
Titled after a passage by the Yugoslavian-American poet Charles Simic, My Noiseless Entourage, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Maja Ruznic, traverses shifting landscapes. These works, as well as the poem, describe the matrixial subject, the gaze of a phantom ‘other’, the core nature of the figures she paints and draws. Ruznic’s subjects are moving to and from locations, in and out of existence.
It is unsurprising that Ruznic’s paintings dropped almost all their saturation when she moved to New Mexico from California. Surrounded by the placid silence of southwestern dust, the paintings are now the color of twilight.
Ruznic states, “I realized when I could see the tooth of the canvas, the canvas is breathing. That is a different kind of texture”. Ruznic starts by pouring thin layers of previously used Gamsol (paint thinner) from her preceding paintings. There is no waste in this methodology, one painting grows out of the other. This is Ruznic’s signature mark-making, using gravity to place color and form onto the canvas or paper, which she then re-negotiates with line and brushwork.
Her double major in art came after studying psychology, and some of these studies indicated to her the way that memory exists in the mind. It is not a static thing that is recalled and then put back in its place; it is a living, developing idea which is never really objective. Ruznic’s work is like this, a dream object. This is by design, as she wants the viewer to feel as if they are trying to capture a cloud in a bottle – something that seems plausible but no one has ever done.
*installation photos by Megan DeSoto
