HARMONIA MUNDI
Without any doubt, Cvetka Hojnik represents a unique phenomenon on the Slovenian otherwise extremely heterogeneous artistic scene, since she in a specific way combines experience from the field of textile design with classical artistic creativity, exploring new techniques and materials with which she achieves original associatively abstract and colouristically expressive, though mostly non-chromatic effect of the artistic work with rich symbolic narration in the prevailingly geometrically stylised morphology on the threshold of minimalism.
In her early period, she created artistic works exclusively with different kinds of fabric, out of the frame of classic panel formats, like a kind of colouristically extremely varied patchwork, not seldom in the form of draperies, often occupying large wall surfaces and many a time the floor, as well. Later she started to discover various possibilities of combining panel painting in acrylic or oil techniques with the use of textile applications of different textures and thickness, often conveying the Informel impression. In the recent period, she fastens individual spheres (e. g. wires woven into a sphere) to the painting surface in the sense of assemblage, as well.
While the last period was based on replaying organically and geometrically abstract morphology with periodic presence of a stylised human figure, emphasizing the contrast between the lines or stiches of arbitrary forms with differently tense colour planes at a typical sound-fluid effect of undulation and flashing with richly chromatic shades, the artist in the recent, symbolist phase, that started somewhere in the middle of the last decade, radically changes the morphology and chromaticism of that period and redirects into explicitly geometric, rectangular and spherical stylization in the form of Euclidean shapes (square, circle, less often triangle) in exclusively non-chromatic scheme (black, grey, white).
Moreover, on the painting surfaces by Cvetka Hojnik one can come across explicit contrasts in the form of lonely and therefore even gaudier hot red, in some rare cases even yellow and orange, colouristically emphases of the female principle. The red colour, red like fire, blood, passion and desire, that adds the presence of the subconscious and chaos but at the same time carries the meaning of continually renewing life, has appeared in the artist’s work yet in her previous phases.
The psychological tension is intensified by black-and-white modulation which has – besides conveying of an explicit depth illusion, a multidimensional symbolic role. The cold non-chromatic black is sometimes complemented by a wide range of grey shades with the grisaille effect, symbolizing the male principle, rationality and, not least important, mortality. The latest cycle (2012/13) is characterized by solid black but the artist experiences it as a spiritual, transcendent dimension. At the same time black is a characteristic of a self-portrait since the artist loves wearing black clothes she creates herself in the sense of alive Gesamtkunstwerk.
The spatial orientations front/behind, below/above, left/right become unimportant since the compositions can be observed from different perspectives and distances and the happening is at the same time enriched with perpetual contrasts between planes and reliefs or between even and structured surfaces with a possibility of simultaneous optical and tactile perception. Also, symbolic replay between light and darkness, womanly softness and virile roughness, materiality and spirituality, transitoriness and eternity, etc. is present.
On the painting surfaces, tiny graphisms in the form of squares, parallel line series or barely visible little spirals appear at the same time. They complement the reticular or addingly composed bigger square or more and more frequently circular shapes, creating a rhytmized composition which spreads beyond the format of the square base.
Here the artist’s play with bases is reflected, for even a real carpet can develop on the walls of the exhibition grounds, covered with panel paintings in the range of colour tones from radiant white over ever denser greys to ‘’pre-Big Bang’’ black. Thus the artistic happening rhythmically spreads from the tiniest graphite record to small squares, from there to the frame of the painting, then to the ‘’carpet’’ and finally to the white wall as the last base in the series. Therefore the artistic work and the exhibition grounds fuse together in a uniform phenomenon like for example at the solo exhibition at the Gallery of the Maribor Fine Artists Society (DLUM) where Cvetka Hojnik transformed three walls of the inferior floor into a kind of endless illuminated manuscript as an unwound rotulus.
The basic artistic objects used by Cvetka Hojnik are thus square and circle, representing the syntactic base of the artistic narration in the form of decentralized compositional net with its beginning and end somewhere in the infinity, passing from one canvas to another. Within the Pythagorean doctrine, originating from the pre-Hellenistic tradition, a square with rectangular realization, often based on the golden section, is a symbol of tetrad, i. e. four philosophical elements, each of them having its own number with a common name quaternarius: earth 4, water 3, air 2 and fire 1. The arithmetic sum of the first four numbers is 10, a decade, a symbol of universal knowledge, perfection and divinity which reflects in the artist’s spirals, symbols of life, fertility and ever-complementing of the chromosomal helix (Fibonacci’s sequence or the golden section).
The circle represents orbis mundi, i. e. the universe and the spiritual dimension, while the triangle complements the square in the sense of perfection, in accordance with the Pythagorean symbolism, as well (picture yourself a quaternarius in the form of a triangle with the 4 as its base and 1 as the vertex). After all, on individual, especially recent Cvetka Hojnik’s paintings, circles inscribed almost to the square border of the base can be seen, as if they were allusions to the squaring the circle, a symbol of the alchemical opus magnum (lapis philosophorum or the philosopher’s stone). Her breakthrough into the space is represented by latest, aforementioned spheres or balls that can ‘’roll’’ from the painting surface even to the floor, at which the wire intertwinement evoke associations of multidimensional space knotting of cosmic strings on the Planck constant level.
Works of art by Cvetka Hojnik, in spite of the impression of puritan Platonian intelligibility, obviously require extensive preparations, for beside defining the composition and proportions, on several sketches different materials must be projected and colours must be chosen, taking into consideration the placement into a specific gallery environment at the same time. Therefore each exhibition poses a setting challenge, both for the artist and for the visitors, since the works each time from a different angle motivate them to meditation about intertwinement of life and death, about co-effect of order/expedience and chaos/coincidence, about manifestations of the subconscious through the consciousness, and moreover, whether cosmogony is not perhaps in fact the consequence of theogony.
Mario Berdič