Creation process
The artist Saša ŠUŠTERŠIČ stated a few years ago that her relation to painting is linked to the reactions nature spontaneously provokes in her. She says: “Nature leaves me breathless, makes me enthusiastic, and I make what I see my own. This perception of forms and colours is mine only and I trust nature, I allow nature to guide me. The forms can be realistic, the colours not always…only the symbolic value of colour is important.”
The principal force is colour; it is the guiding line in her painting and it led her to get rid of the things that may get between her and the canvas, so as to have a more physical, or bodily, relation with her works: a few years ago Saša started painting with her fingers, her palms. This authentic contact is also sensual and allows her to be in direct contact with the texture of her painting.
Her relation with nature takes form in the manner she includes flowers or dried leaves, collected during walks, in the most of her works. She started by using dried tea leaves: mixed with colour, the leaves create a relief structure in some parts of her paintings. In this way, also thanks to the manner colour is applied to the canvas with the palm of her hand, the surface of the painting becomes vivid and dynamic.
The most of her paintings evoke landscapes. But they are not realistic landscapes. Seascapes or landscapes may be guessed at; yet all recognizable detail has been evicted or neutralised by Saša ŠUŠTERŠIČ. From this whole the elemental, interior structure of the work emerges. The rest is abstract, by choice.
Saša ŠUŠTERŠIČ never draws in nature, but rather reinterprets her sensory impressions once back in her studio. From these experiences, “registered and matured,” the themes of her works are born, in time. Her hands work like transmitters; they spontaneously translate her sensory experiences onto the canvas.
Her most recent works were conceived on the Island of La Réunion, where, in a foreign hemisphere, she explored new colours and tones, conveying a natural environment that was totally new to her.
Her feelings continue to gain in intensity, conveyed particularly through a more precise and detailed language of colours, which gives form to her confident artistic expression. The rational part of her work is completely subordinated to the emotional aspect – liberating random spaces, colour coincidences and sensorial injunctions that suddenly take shape in her work. This spontaneity of chance encounters between elements, translated in her painting, gives her work a uniquely personal quality.
«The painter intention is not to explain or show off her landscape, the one still remains veiled in mist and rain, guests or trembling of illusional visions of light and glare. Her landscapes in the viewer opens up an inner landscape.»
Anton Starc
October 2011