Space in Two Acts

From its very beginning, through different series and in various media, the art practice of Petra Varl has been built on images that at first glance may be understood in formal terms as a representation of the pop art strategy for addressing the object and the cult of mass-produced images. But there is much greater intimacy in her images. Through her remarkably precise personal aesthetic, Varl significantly reduces their ideological charge, thus allowing viewers to reflect solely on their own experience of the image she presents. Certainly, her most characteristic works are those whose inner logic expresses a contrast between the image and the background in which the artist intervenes. Whether this is a print, a painting on canvas, a drawing on paper, or a metal cutout, Varl’s gesture is not merely a formal record of a certain state of affairs but, on the level of the content, symbolizes contrasts in the attitudes and relationships that arise within society. As a result, the work is always suspended between humour and sadness, love and pain, white and black, and, not least of all, between darkness and light.

Varl has been tirelessly exploring and reflecting on her own artistic practice for more than thirty years; her exploration reached its peak with the exhibition Near Light, which she and her collaborators presented at Galerija Božidar Jakac in 2018. This project already indicated certain concrete formal shifts in her practice that are connected inextricably to the artist’s return to three-dimensional space and her more intensive study of the materials that can make this transition possible. If Near Light may be seen as Varl’s meticulous intervention in the symbolically charged exhibition space of a former monastery church, then we might understand Space – a project that takes place simultaneously at both Galerija Rigo and in a newly constructed space (one that resonates in its form with Galerija Rigo) created by Varl and her collaborators in her flat at Vodnikov trg 5, in Ljubljana – as her continued exploration of the different media in which she constructs an entirely new total environment. Space, then, may be described as a pivotal work that contains within itself the artist’s uncompromising statement on the past even as it reveals the direction of her current artistic interests. For while the opening paragraph of this text summarized Varl’s thirty-year career in a few sentences, we must stress that her current interest lies somewhere else completely; it can be seen in the tension that arises between the first and second acts of Space.

The first act of Space, which appears as the artist’s intervention in the empty exhibition space of Galerija Rigo, is undoubtedly key, for it presents the basis on which Varl constructs the new experience of the viewer. If her earlier projects “occupied” the walls of the exhibition space with various kinds of two-dimensional images, the current project directly opposes this practice: here, the artworks, as objects in different colour tones, occupy only the floor. But the formal transformation in artist’s spatial understanding is not in the foreground; instead, the key for understanding the project lies in the artist’s gesture of the created objects. These, in fact, are a selection of leftover images from projects Varl created over her thirty-year career, which are now “hermetically” sealed in a play of new objects. The gesture can be understood as the artist’s settling of accounts with her past – a “retrospective” of sorts, but one that is stripped of any view into the past and instead occupies the exhibition space as a new object that heralds the artist’s current interest. To comprehend this gesture, we must distance ourselves from the idea that the loss, concealment, or absence of the material presence of art is understood as tragic and, for this reason, disturbing to anyone who confronts it. We must be aware that there is also an art that is created so as to eventually disappear, due to its ephemeral nature.

All the more logical, then, is Varl’s decision to present in a newly constructed space in Ljubljana, simultaneously with the Galerija Rigo event, the second act of her project Space, which places the spectator’s experience – and co-creation of this experience – in the foreground. Here space, sound, light, and body are not merely external factors, but essential elements for understanding Varl’s thought. The environment created by these four “active ingredients” draws the spectator into a play of unexpected perspectives and the discovery of the space, which is in its essence entirely neutral, a mobile “white cube” designed by the architect Matic Vrabič. The project Space includes four different elements that do not interact solely on an aesthetic level but appear in a kind of “cacophony” that interrogates the relation between body and space. Varl thus creates a tension in the space between the work’s material aspect and something that exists at the edge of material presence, between the visual and the non-visual. The first element that inhabits Space is a triangular metal structure which, on the one hand, can act solely as an aesthetic object, while, on the other hand, it serves as something the spectator can sit or lie on. It is important to note that in its function it is not solely an aesthetic object, but rather, within the whole “choreography”, it symbolizes an open space and the possibilities that light – as light – has in the space. The second element towards the creation of a “total environment” was developed by Varl in collaboration with Sašo Kalan, who designed the project’s sound, which is one of the ephemeral elements that, in its (im-)materiality, encompasses the entirety of the space. An identical role is played by the third element – light, which is the only one of these active elements that works primarily on the visual level and, perhaps, most directly touches on the artist’s earlier understanding of the work of art. But now even this visual element is different, as Varl no longer understands light through the monumentality of monochromatic surfaces but rather as the thing that binds them together and creates the relationships between them. Just like the sound, this continuous colour composition in light, which was developed by the artist in collaboration with Pascal Mérat and Janez Grošelj, “responds” to the specifics of the designed space. The sound and light do not illustrate the space but instead derive from its uncompromising emptiness; at the same time, they attempt to communicate directly with the space’s other active elements. The fourth, last, and perhaps most crucial element of the entire project is the spectator – the spectator’s body. Without it, Space does not exist. Just as in the earlier project Near Light, in this project too, in this segment of it, Varl asked the fashion designer Uroš Belantič to collaborate with her, and his design again highlights a minimalist strategy for interrogating the relationship between the body and the space. Although it seems that in every interval Space remains the same, it always appears as something entirely new. But despite its completely different formal language from Varl’s earlier works, the present project is again something that speaks of an experience that permeates the space between darkness and light.

Tevž Logar, 2020