As abstract art flourished after World War II, numerous artworks in the second half of the 20th century were created in the field of abstract painting, both on a global and Slovenian scale. After the rise of new media and the digital paradigm, painting, being many times declared dead as well, still holds a position as a fascinating artistic medium. It seems that artistic and personal questions derived from self-referential sensory and emotional worlds, as displayed in the painterly practice of Ana Jagodic, have not yet been exhausted. The question is whether they will ever be.                                                                                     

Elements of order, purity, simplicity, and spirituality in a work of art are manifestations of a moral dimension that abstract art, by definition, contains. Brushworks that the artist’s hand does are an emotional interpretation of the artist himself. By this act, rather than representing the object only, further steps are taken, meaning abstract art is very intimate for the creator and the viewer. The most apparent difference between mimesis and abstract is that it does not represent the artist himself but the outer reality. In its most pure and essential form, abstract art reveals the artist’s mentality, hidden obsessions, understanding of the world, and perceived transcendence. Transmitted to the viewer’s perception and personal experience, an intimate bond with the artist is created.

The artworks of Ana Jagodic, an artist of the younger generation, can be included in the field of abstract art. However, the notion of abstraction in connection with her paintings does not make sense within a limited, historically defined artistic phenomenon but as a fundamental question of painting. Her abstract paintings may be interpreted on two levels. The first one is formally aesthetic, and the second is emotionally subjective. Their antagonism manifests itself as a desire to achieve a formal notion of beauty and a desire for transcendence and the sublime. In defining the aesthetic in fine arts, conceptions such as harmony, proportion, and form are used. These important notions express qualities functioning as procedures and responses of an artist in the making of the artwork. The appearance of the effects they define is material in nature, whereby the viewer physically perceives them with the help of the senses through colors, shapes, rhythm, and proportions. It is the “real” of an image, which is self-sufficient and autonomous. The abstract image achieves its identity by withholding external representations, depending only on formal elements and their mutual relations, defined by a simple phenomenological presence of various interventions on the image surface: from smooth and subtle color layers to more powerful pasty gestures. Formal elements like these may be observed in Color Attachments, Carnivore Pleasures, and Dance by the Fire, where the artist focuses on color relations, comprehensiveness of shapes, and color saturation. She creates painterly space devoid of figural forms through color contrasts and shapes placement. With consideration, formal units are arranged by individual art organisms in a delicate visual sequence, skillfully using the laws of chromatic contrasts.

Ana Jagodic represents her vision of an ideal color composition, which autonomies color and elevates it into an independent entity. Therefore the subject of an image becomes the flat form, whereby only color gives it a tangible visual expression. The allure of color harmonies, for example, in the painting Dying Star, has a strong emotional charge. The precise nature of the human psyche cannot be depicted with linear contours; diffuse color fields approach this problem better. Depicted abstract structures are perceived as living organisms and carriers of psychic perceptions, whether it is violently eruptive emotions evoked by the paintings Birth of Corporeality or overflowing bands of bluish tones, represented by their cooler counterpoint in the paintings Transcendence and The Gold underneath Your Layers. The brushwork in Still Water Lands is dominated by green with minor accents of blue and yellow. In art theory, green, due to its associations with nature, growth, and renewal, is considered a color that illustrates movement and expansion. Is it justified to interpret these images as subliminal acts, as an interweaving of magical messages of spiritual ritual? Based on the premise that the work of art is an inexhaustible source of poetic meanings through metaphors representing deeper layers of human consciousness, the works of Ana Jagodic cannot be depicted with objective immediacy. In this sense, her painting practice is defined by the framework of individual “poetic truth,” and precise artistic articulation of this subjective reality seems to be an essential motivation for her artistic practice. The author’s statement is the language of a color trace, a brushstroke on a canvas, whereby the absence of discursiveness is the sign of her presence testifying to the truth of the art, which is the act of creation itself.

In this context, the artist’s attitude towards creation may be understood as existential: from the confrontation with the material concreteness of the work in which she engaged her body, her presence is perceived as concrete physicality. In this sense, the psychoanalytic subtext of her creative impulses is revealed to us in the works Entrance, Wings of Desire, and Spheres Kissing. Inevitably, the visual idioms conceived by abstract painters to reduce the visual language to a bare basis and thus to its essence and purest expression create a formal membrane of the integrity of the artistic image.

Let us look at the works of Ana Jagodic with our eyes wide open, as the demonstration of her subjectivity in addition to the complex artistic organism is for us to see fully. Her works of art are marked with concepts of integrity and harmony, transcendence, emotionality, and analyticity. Perhaps today, more than ever is necessary for the artist to synthesize the material and the poetic into a kind of dual sensibility of an image with a deep emotional dimension.

Iztok Hotko, journalist and art critic