Miljan Vulovic
Member Since October 2014
Artist Statement After a long break Katarina Švabić has, to our joy, returned to study art. The return is marked, above all, by great passion, intense work on study of new ways and issues, and more importantly, as Picasso said, by finding new answers and ways of expressing our inner world and worldviews.
Sometime in early 2012, Katarina begun a new cycle of exploration. Through a series of photographs presciently called Roots and Wires, in an essentially lyrical atmosphere produced by relations in the microcosm of grass, trees and branches, a central motif arises – a nest, or photomask or unexpected plate. However, we quickly forget what makes this central shape, because we see that it is always and again a circle, a circle which as an ideal circle almost does not exist in nature but which ideally combines with it like mystic druid circle at Stonehenge. In the next photographic cycle, the circular shape turns from the marvelous element, from an interesting visual accent, to a key player in an inspiring game of sharpness and misty vagueness dismissals. The center of the world moves from the center to the periphery and back, and in this movement we anticipate an almost cinematic dynamism, an almost classic Hollywood dialogue accompanied by acuity switching from one participant to another, which contributes to the dramatic tension. Despite the delicate color palette, this series of photographs has one trenchant, almost audible rhythm, the Orf rhythm, which sharply resets Nadarian question – whether the photo misses sound or movement that would fully reflect all of what the photographer wanted to say.
After these photographic studies, Katarina Švabić returns to her favorite technique – drawing, and there suddenly, the demons of ancient times begin to pour, obsession with which she fought before the break, and echoes of her “stunning abstraction” appear. Seemingly peaceful world of photography and circle, that has already started to turn into the main research subject, disappear in a whirl of abstract forms in which the circle is no longer the ideal form, perfect geometric shape, a central factor of all events, but only one in a series of imperfect elements that make our imperfect “living world,” as the cycle is called. The color briefly appears raw, pure contrast to pastel and gentle colors of “Roots and Wire,” but quickly disappears as this fierce and turbulent drawing wants to explore, wants to find a lost essence. At the end of the cycle, circle motif is gradually turning into wheels similar to those on the walls of the temple in Konark which bear sun chariot. And as if they were the one, that East Asian counterparts of Apollo chariot, which conveyed her into another world of thought, Katarina Švabić returns to circle, but this time to mandala circle that allows colors and shapes contained therein to bloom like a lotus flower of the truth and to discover the hidden passion.
That passion will finally find its full expression in yet another paradox. Using a paradigmatic and omnipresent powerful tool of the time – the computer, she rejects the infinity of chromatic variations it offers and takes only two non-colors – black and few degrees of gray, in order to start a strict, almost Jansenist study of microcosm, the relationship of fluid white-gray shapes contained in a mighty black circle. Now, at this stage of Katarina’s quest, the circle gets its full mystical significance. It is the magic circle of the old alchemists, Uroboros of introspection, the circle of numeric revelations, but at the same time it is a new example of minimalist expressionist art on the trail of Japanese Ensō.
These circles are a kind of Borromeo circles. Each on their own, those circles represent closed, insightful and brilliantly, visually told story. In each of them we inevitably go further beyond an offered associativity given as a hint in the title, to find a far deeper resonance of artist’s intimate feeling, her joy of plunging into the depths of the black circ
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